“You won’t be,” Faith assured him. She was more herself than ever, despite the iron cuffs. It was freedom that gave her a bit of the sight, it was the wind and the clatter of the horses’ hooves, and the opportunity to say whatever she pleased without being punished for her thoughts. It was simple enough to see this Cornishman’s fate. He talked about his homeland in his sleep. “I’ve seen your future and you live to be an old man in a place called Penny Come Quick,” she told Finney.

He was a good man and deserved good fortune. In fact, he’d been born in what the Cornish called Pny-cwm-cuic, a village on the Fal River, referred to as Penny Come Quick by outsiders. It was here that his wife and daughter had been buried, and his one wish was to return before he passed on, so that he might be buried beside them. He felt a chill along his backbone. No one on this side of the ocean knew where he’d come from. He thought perhaps he had a special little passenger. As a Cornishman, he understood there were those who had the sight, and this girl was obviously such a person. Whatever she was, he wasn’t likely to let her fall into the hands of the shrew at their heels. He told old Arnold to race; all he need do was to ask him nicely to please gallop and the horse picked up speed. That was when Martha Chase tried to catch up, on the small wooden bridge where there was barely space for a carriage, let alone a woman charging ahead. Arnold was lumbering and huge, and there was not enough room for this woman to run past the carriage on the narrow bridge so that she might reach Faith. They heard her cry out, a sharp cry that chased the gulls from the marshes. The birds rose up in a flapping cloud of white and gray, circling in a swirl above them. There was a thud and then the shouting stopped.

Jack Finney called for the horse to halt, and Arnold complied, heaving from his exertions. Finney and Faith turned to look over their shoulders. Behind them the bridge was empty. There were hundreds of gulls still wheeling through the sky, as they often do when they spy something that might make a meal.

“Stay here,” Finney told the girl.

The peddler climbed down and walked back to the bridge. He had long legs and he wore a brown jacket he’d had for nearly twenty years that had served him well. Finney was a rough man with a tender heart and he had a lump in his throat. He didn’t need the sight to know that something was wrong. He put a hand over his eyes, for the sunlight was bright, and his vision wasn’t what it once was. The peddler was forty, but he’d let himself go, for he’d had no reason not to do so, and the fact of it was, he drank too much. All he saw below the bridge was the brackish water and the weeds and the black stones and the sand, and then he saw that the water was red.