THE HOTEL AT CLOTHIER WAS QUIET UNTIL WORD OF THE SHOOTINGS at Sharples. I was stretched out on my bed reading Bleak House, the black-trimmed window frame wide open to the Sunday morning sunshine. I heard men yelling from the direction of the train depot, then loud voices in the lobby below. When I went downstairs I saw a crowd outside listening to a short, curly haired man who stopped talking often to catch his breath in great sobs.

“Hit were the state police and Chafin’s thugs! They shot up our houses with the younguns still yet inside. They caught the women and held them out front so’s we couldnt git off a shot. They’s three good men laying dead up there.” His hands went to his face. “They hit my baby in the arm. Doc Lewis had to cut it—”

No one cried out in anger. They listened in silence now, and when one of the man’s friends led him away they shouldered their rifles and began walking toward Logan. I went over to Doctor Booker.

“They’ll all be coming back,” I said.

Blair Mountain was one of the most powerful mountains I’d ever seen. It sprawled the length of Hewitt Creek and thrust out its arms to push away the punier hills. Shadows rolled across the folded slopes to mark the time of day, and sometimes the folds opened into a cove, seductive, that promised a way across. But there were no passes through.

“How will you go over?” I asked Rondal before he set out with the Point Lick men.

“We aint sure,” he admitted. “Some will try over to Sharples, but we hear the road’s guarded pretty good. And the blackberry and mountain laurel is growed up too thick to pass over the ridge in places. We’ll have to hunt and peck for a place to cross.”

“You should have waited for the cold before you marched,” I said.

“But they’s cover for us when the leaves is on the trees. Besides, you got to go when your time comes.”

He buttoned me into my wrinkled white uniform and walked me up the creek to a one-room schoolhouse that would serve as our field hospital. Then he left me without a word, with only the most casual wave of a hand. I went cold with fear. There was something about the back of him as he walked toward the creek with his slight limp, something that said even if he crossed Blair Mountain he would keep on going to God knew where, but it would be out of my life.

I ran into the schoolhouse in a panic. Dr. Booker was already there, opening boxes of supplies.

“I got to do something! I wont never see him again!”

He put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed tight. “They’s plenty to do right here. And that’s all you can do, child.”