At this, his words became indistinct, and the hangman moved forward to cover his face and place the noose around his neck. He tied Simms’s legs together and checked the bonds that held his hands. Suddenly, the yard was silent, as if the crowd was collectively holding their breath in anticipation. The rope wound its way through a pulley at the top of the scaffold and there was a faint rasping sound as the wheel turned. Simms’s feet began to rise, kicking and bucking as his body fought against the constricting pull.
The crowd cheered and Lewis watched only long enough to make sure that the hangman had done his job well. He had; the noose held and Simms struggled for only a few minutes before his body became still and hung limp from the rope. It was done.
It took Lewis a long time to make his way out of the yard. Several of the women had fainted, and the knots of people around their fallen bodies obstructed the flow of traffic. No one seemed to be in any hurry to leave. They were prepared to make a day of it, and now baskets were being opened and cloths unfolded for picnic lunches. He finally made the gate and collected his horse, happy to leave the throng to their grisly holiday.
Spicer had not been able to get any closer than the gate, but had seen enough to make him sober and thoughtful as they rode along, neither speaking of what they had just witnessed. They had scheduled appointments that Lewis knew they should hasten to meet, but he felt a sudden reluctance to carry on, to spend the rest of the day with the petty and picayune transgressions that would be trotted out for him to exclaim over and chastise. At this moment they hardly seemed worth the effort.
What he wanted more than anything was to sit with Betsy for a time. He didn’t want to talk about the day’s events, or about Simms, although he knew that at some point he would share with her what he had learned about Sarah’s death. He wanted only a cup of tea and the comfort of his wife — to hear her sensible comments on everyday affairs. To hear Minta’s tinkling laugh and the steady beat of Seth’s hard-working hammer. To sit with his feet on a stool and watch Martha and Henry play in the yard.
He reined in his horse and turned to Spicer. “Why don’t you go ahead and take those meetings?” he said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Spicer’s face lit up. “All by myself? Really?”
“Really. I think I’ll call it a day.”
And with that he turned his horse toward home.
Chapter One
Nathan Elliott had been missing for twenty-four hours and everyone had pretty well given up any hope of finding him, including Thaddeus Lewis, who knew that an injured man had little hope of surviving a second night in what had been a particularly frosty Canadian autumn.
When the call went out, Lewis had answered immediately. He joined the meeting at Murphy’s Tavern, where the local constable was laying out his plan to organize the men into a search party. There were plenty of volunteers. The lakeside village of Wellington lost more men to the water than anywhere else, and search parties were often formed to comb the shores for the bodies of sailors or fishermen who had been reported lost from a vessel wrecked in a storm.
But a person who had gone missing on land was a novelty, and the tavern was full, with not only local men, but a number who had arrived from the neighbouring villages of Bloomfield and Raynor’s Creek.
Constable Williams sorted them into pairs, and then Reuben Elliott led them all out to where he said he had left the wounded man — his brother Nathan. They had been cutting firewood from the woodlot at the back of their farm, he said, when he had attempted to fell a widow-maker, one of those trees that falls the wrong way and gets hung up in the surrounding branches. They were tricky, these trees, for there was no way to predict how they would come down. Reuben was an experienced woodsman, however, and knew what he was doing. But it had been a long time, he said, since his brother had engaged in heavy farm labour.
“I told Nate to stand well back. But the top branches wouldn’t budge at first. I cut away the trunk, but it just hung there. He ran forward to help just as it finally let go. A big branch landed right on his head.”
Nathan had been unconscious and bleeding, but still breathing apparently, when Reuben ran to get help, but when he returned with a neighbour they had been unable to locate the body. They’d searched for hours, but found nothing, and by the time the constable had been contacted, it was growing dark. A further search was delayed until morning.
Reuben led them straight to a clearing in a heavily-wooded section at the back of his property.
“I’m sure this is the right place,” he insisted in response to a comment that they might be in the wrong part of the woods. “Look, you can see the fresh cuts on the stumps, and there’s the pile of logs we were going to haul out. Besides, do you think I don’t know my own land? He was here, and now he’s gone.”
The searchers fanned out from the body-less clearing, two by two, calling Nathan’s name as they went. Some of the men had brought their dogs, which barked and yapped crazily as they tore off through the underbrush, far more likely to run down a rabbit than anything else, Lewis figured. He hoped that if they did find Nathan Elliott, the dogs wouldn’t tear him to pieces before their masters were able to call them off.
Lewis was teamed with Martin Carr, a young lad of fourteen or so, and was grateful for the boy’s sharp eyes. His own eyesight had once been keen, but he knew that it was beginning to fail, and he found that he had to squint to see anything at a distance. Betsy had been urging him to get spectacles, but he resisted. He had to admit that there was a certain amount of vanity in this resistance; he didn’t like the notion that he was growing old and felt disinclined to advertise his creeping infirmities to the world.
He and Martin set off in a northwesterly direction, sweeping back and forth in a zigzagging motion, checking under bushes and in thickets.
“Look over there.” Martin pointed off to his right. “The grass has all been flattened down.”
Lewis squinted, but could see nothing. He walked over to where Martin had pointed. The boy was right, there had been something there, but it was almost certainly the trampling of deer as they made their slow autumn move into deeper woods. They followed the trail that led from this, and at intervals they found coyote scat and mounds of rabbit pellets scattered amongst the fallen leaves. It was obviously a well-worn thoroughfare for animals, but there was nothing to indicate the recent passage of a man.
The trail led them into buckthorn and spindly poplar. In places there were gulleys and swampy areas, where they had to pick their way around, the footing too unsure to risk climbing through.
“If he came through here, he’d be pretty scratched up,” Martin said. “There isn’t much of a path.”
Martin was in front, trying as much as he could to shoulder the hard work of breaking trail, but mostly managing to let go the branches at just the wrong moment so that they snapped back into Lewis’s face. Lewis was certain that Nathan could not have come this way. Even if he had regained consciousness and wandered off in some sort of dazed delirium, he would scarcely have been in any condition to battle his way through these thorns and brambles. Lewis’s hands were badly scratched after only a few minutes in the scrubby growth.
Finally, they reached a line of thick dogwood that stretched in both directions. Martin bulled his way through the dense bushes and Lewis followed his trampled path. Beyond the dogwood was a stream.
“If he did come through here, surely he would’ve followed the crick along,” Martin said. “There’s only a little water in it and it would be easier than walking through the bush. Which way do you figure we should go?”
It was not a wide stream, more, as Martin said, a creek, whose course dried in the heat of summer and at other times of the year flowed only strongly enough to prevent the dogwood from gaining hold. It could well peter out to nothing;