and over on the other side of the river, while the Silvers’ cabin is just a quarter mile down the hill from Frankie and Charlie’s place. The snow was knee-deep and the river was frozen. I reckon she didn’t want to chance crossing it, with the baby and all. Anyhow, she showed up at Charlie’s parents’ house, cool as snowmelt, saying he was gone getting his Christmas liquor. She said he had gone to George Young’s house with his jug and his fiddle. Boasted about how she’d been busy since sunup doing her washing and redding the cabin. She didn’t seem to mind much that her husband was gone, only she wanted somebody to feed the stock. So the Silvers sent over Alfred, their next oldest boy, to see to the cattle, and Frankie went back home.
“Every day after that, Frankie would stop by, still more peevish than affrighted, saying Charlie wasn’t back yet, and the Silvers were growing more anxious by the minute. Charlie was a sunny fellow; always a smile and a song; everybody liked him. Finally Frankie said she didn’t care if her no-account husband came back or not, she was going to stay at her mother’s house, and she was taking the baby with her.
“By then the Silvers were all-fired worried about Charlie, it being the dead of winter and all. Since Charlie Silver was a great one for drinking and fiddling, they thought it was just possible that he had found a party too good to leave and was holed up drunk somewhere, but it had been more than ten days by then, and it wasn’t like him to be gone that long. They sent over to George Young’s place, looking to find him, and George said that Charlie had come for that Christmas liquor right enough, and he had got it, but he said that Charlie had come and gone many days ago. The Youngs hadn’t seen him since.
“By then the Silvers were hunting the woods for him, and all the trails that led to George’s cabin, in case Charlie had fallen or come to harm while he was on his way home from the Youngs’ place, and maybe the worse for drink. The Silvers and some of their neighbors and kinfolk even went down to examine the river, but it was frozen solid and covered with unbroken snow. There was no sign that anybody had fallen in. After that, some of the neighbors—my people, Elijah Green, the Youngs, the Howells, the Hutchinses, and old Jack Collis—kept up the search, and Jacob—he was beside himself by this time—he … well, he went over into Tennessee.”
Whatever we had been expecting, it was not this. “Went to Tennessee?” said Butler. “What did he do that for?”
Baker shrugged. “Advice, I reckon you’d call it. He had heard tell of a Guinea Negro there, over Jonesborough way, that people say has the conjure power.”
I smiled at this touching bit of superstition, but then I recalled the tragic nature of this tale, and it sobered me at once. Parents who have lost a child will reach out for whatever comfort they can find. I was interested in this development. Guinea Negroes were said to have occult powers that they brought with them as a vestige of paganism from their own lands, but I had seldom heard of anyone asking them for more than simple fortune-telling: benign promises of a rosy future. This urgent task of finding a lost youth would prove a challenge indeed for such a conjure man. “And what did the African tell Mr. Silver?”
“He asked Silver to draw him a map of the valley where Charlie went missing, to mark the cabins, the river, the ridges, the fields—everything. Then that old conjure man took up a pendant, strung on a leather thong, and he swung it around in a circle over the map. To hear Jacob Silver tell it, that ball swung around and around over the map, getting slower and slower, until it came to a full stop and just hovered there—right over Charlie’s own cabin. And the conjure man, he looked up and said, ‘That boy never left his own house.’”
Butler and I looked at each other. Surely the prisoner was here on more