Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) by Thomas Hollyday Read Free Book Online

smell it.”
    “I don’t,” said the Pastor, his face serious.
    “Me either,” said Maggie.
    The Pastor looked at Frank. “When I was a boy,” he said, “My father told me that if I ever smelled tobacco smoke, and there wasn’t nobody smoking, then it was a sure sign that evil was nearby. There was a local legend, come down from the Nanticokes that used to have their villages around here, that the smell of burning tobacco was the way the good spirits kept the evil ones away.”
    “Do you think the spirits are after me?” asked Frank, smiling.
    The Pastor, his face thoughtful, said, “They might be after any one of us.”
    “I don’t smell it anymore,” said Frank.
    “If you guys are through with your ghost stories, let’s look at the wreck,” said Maggie.
    The three of them squatted around the remnants of the wreck. On all sides were stretched the tense white surveyor strings, their clean straight lines out of place in the construction disorganization of the site. Besides the wooden stem-piece that Spyder had destroyed, there were several other timbers that had been ripped by the bulldozer from the ground. Some were of substantial size. Most had fresh marks on them where the bulldozer blade had cut into the old wood as it pushed them upward out of the soil.
    “Cant frame construction,” said Frank, as he gently touched the heavy timbers. “The old ship carpenters built them this way for a long time. It solved the problem of strength when the bow rounded to the stem and the frames could no longer be at right angles to the keel.”
    He pointed to some round pieces of wood that stuck halfway out of the timbers. “The way they connected them was by these wooden pegs. That’s a sign this wreck might be old. The problem for us is that in ship construction the carpenters often used the older methods in newer boats. Especially in a rural area like the Eastern Shore. So it’s hard to date her this way .”
    “It’s a start,” said Maggie.
    “Oak. I’m pretty sure of that. Whether it’s American oak or English oak I’d have to have an expert take a look. It might tell us where she was built. Then again the American merchants shipped a lot of oak to England.”
    He looked closely at a part of one of the frames. “I think this timber was burned at one time.”
    “That fits with what I found in one of my probes,” said Maggie.
    “Sometimes the carpenters charred the wood so it would bend around the frames. However, this looks more like destructive burning. These timbers are likely from the lower hull below the waterline. That might mean the part above the waterline burned away before she sank. Then the river water put out the fire in the lower section. Let’s see.” Frank put some numbers in the ground at his feet. “So if the hull was twenty five feet from keel to deck, and she drew fifteen feet, all we may have is the lower fifteen feet. If she was sitting on the bottom when she burned, say at low tide, then the waterline might have been high and dry, well above the water surface, and we may have less than fifteen feet of her.”
    He sat back on his heels and reconnoitered the site, his eyes moving along the white surveying lines, thinking of promising excavation areas. He tapped some of the up-thrust stakes lightly with his archaeologist’s trowel as he looked. He scratched his neck and adjusted his hat.
    “OK,” he said. “What do we know and what do we think we know?”
    “There’s at least the bow section of a ship here and no reason to think that the rest of her isn’t here,” said Maggie.
    “Can we assume that it’s all here running out toward the riverbank and down a few feet under the surface?”
    Maggie nodded. “I think that’s right. I think we should set up the dig on that orientation.”
    Frank continued, “If this ship is early, if she dates to the Eighteenth Century or even before then, this would be a significant find. There haven’t been many of these early commerce