A slim mulatto girl appeared in the doorway with a feather duster in her hand. She wore a plain cotton smock under an apron and had a white kerchief knotted around her temples. She came forward shyly. “Yes, Mama?”

“Baby, take this gentleman over to Free Love Hall. He looking for the Manlys.”

Saffron lifted her eyes cautiously toward Sam. She laid the duster aside and deftly slipped off the apron, which she hung on a nail behind the back door.

“We walking or riding?” she asked in a voice as quiet as paper.

“Walking,” Sam said.

Saffron kicked up her legs one at a time and slipped off her sandals. “Summertime,” she said. “Like to feel the sand between my toes.”

As they left the kitchen, Sam thanked Bessie and then Gabrielle. He glanced back once, half out the door, and caught that same sad look in Gabrielle’s brown eyes. She suddenly looked like a little girl who missed going barefoot—a young woman thrust into middle age.

Had they been alone, he might have kissed her on the cheek and whispered something tender and encouraging—the sort of thing a stranger could get shot for down here, he figured.

Instead, he walked out the door with an eighteen-year-old mulatto girl who moved as if she had no clothes on at all, gracefully unaware of her body. On the long, dusty walk to Free Love Hall, he watched her every chance he got.

Alex Manly is a white man—that was his first impression. They caught him at his toilet in a small back room of Free Love Hall, his starched shirt unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled. His face glistened. He held up his wet hands and forearms and stared at them, only mildly surprised.

“Alex Manly, I presume.” Sam rubbed his neck and hoped somebody would offer him a glass of water. Saffron left and reappeared with a tin ladle of well water so cold and metallic it made his teeth ache. But he drank it all. She took the empty ladle and padded away, her bare feet slap-slapping on the scrubbed wood floor.

“You a Pinkerton agent?”

“Pinkerton? What?” Sam was caught off-guard.

A bigger man, more muscular and more recognizably Negro, had come in quietly. He said, “They been snooping around. Trying to find out are we plotting to overthrow the United States of America.”

Sam studied his face—Frank Manly. Fit the description.

Alex laughed and toweled off his hands and face. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“Chicago, last,” Sam said.

“Lot of Pinkerton men up that way. You a traveling man?” Frank Manly said.

“Some.”

“Me, too—some. Let me see your badge.”

“I told you, I don’t have a badge. I work for Clawson, the Messenger. We’ve been looking for your brother.”

“Well, I haven’t been hiding out,” Alex Manly said.