I discover his name is Aaron Newman and that he’s a widower—his wife and child dying together in childbirth. His story makes me even more anxious for Sarah. I learn that he works with a network of free blacks here in Culpeper, and other Quakers just north in Loudoun County, helping to move slaves north to freedom. Conducting slaves is risky, dangerous work that needs patience and planning, he tells me, but when there are only a few more hours of daylight, I can’t sit around waiting any more. I go off to search, striking out toward the river, the way they’d come, keeping the Blue Ridge Mountains at my back.

I’ve only just left Culpeper when I come upon a posse of men. Two have rifles slung over their shoulders. The rest have pistols at their hips. All five are on horseback.

“Has there been trouble around here?” I ask one of the rifle holders.

He stares at me with cold eyes and says nothing.

“I’d like to be warned if I ought to be carrying a gun.”

The second rifleman spins his horse around and trots in front of the others. “There’s a runaway coming up this way. We got some men flushing him out with dogs. You should move on so you don’t get hurt in the scuffle.”

“Just the one runaway?”

“That’s the word we got. Why? You know of some more? You see something in town? We heard someone around here’s been helping them.”

I keep myself still and make sure to hold his eyes. “Just seems like a lot of men and firepower to catch one person.”

He shrugs. “He’s got a fat bounty on his head.”

“So, it’s a man that you’re after?”

“That’s a lot of questions for someone passing through,” one of the pistol men says. “He might be a bounty hunter himself, Earl.”

Earl looks me up and down and dismisses me with a spit of tobacco. “He’s no bounty hunter,” he says. “What he might be is the nigger-lover who’s been hiding runaways.” He steps his horse in front of me as his friends pull their horses in a line behind him.

“I’ve not been hiding anyone,” I say. “I’m passing through.”

I close the gap between me and Earl’s horse and stroke her neck. The horse nudges her nose on to my shoulder. I scratch between her ears and she lowers her head.

Earl yanks her away. “Then keep on passing and get away from my horse.”

“Suit yourselves,” I say backing away from them.

I walk at a good clip until I’m out of sight, and then I dash into the woods and break into a run. I scan left and right as I go. They’re not after Sarah, but they might catch her by accident. Twice my feet get tangled in the underbrush, making me fall. I softly call her name every hundred yards or so, and get back the trill of the warbler and the wren.