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 evidence than a trick of ball and string over a map? “They searched the cabin then?”
“Already had!” said Charlie Baker, grinning triumphantly. While Mr. Jacob Silver was gone over the mountain into Tennessee, and Frankie had quit the place to go home to the Stewarts, that old bear hunter
Jack Collis decided to look a little closer to home. He never did put much stock in what Frankie had told him, ’cause he couldn’t find no tracks in the woods, despite the deep snow, and he couldn’t think where Charlie could have got to without leaving some kind of a trail. While everybody else was out combing the deep woods and the land over by the Youngs’ place, Jack Collis snuck back to that cabin of Frankie and Charlie’s, and he poked around. There was a goodly pile of ashes in the fireplace, as if somebody had burned a whole cord of wood without cleaning out the fireplace, he said. Jack studied about that for a while, and then he put some of those ashes in clean water in the kettle over the fire, and what do you think he found?” Baker beamed at us expectantly.
We waited politely, for it was obvious that he was bursting to tell us.
“Grease bubbles!”
When my expression did not change, the constable must have realized that such rustic deductions were wasted upon gentlemen, for we lacked the requisite frontier skills to recognize the significance of that discovery. After a flash of disappointment, Baker explained. “There shouldn’t be any grease in fireplace