in the air above the candle flame. This sight inspired in me waves of self-pity as I imagined elegant velvet-curtained offices in the great stone edifices of Raleigh: roaring fires blazing beneath marble mantelpieces and crystal decanters of brandywine on mahogany sideboards. In such palatial quarters, more prosperous young lawyers, those who had read law with statesmen and judges, and who were not eighth sons in genteel but modest families, would practice their calling with an exalted clientele, while I, who had read law with my poor older brother, rest his soul, sat freezing in a frontier courthouse, far from the corridors of power, and likely to remain so.
“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