Chapter 3

Elias Hooper was not what Johnny had expected.

He’d constructed a picture in his mind on the two county ride east — a grave and weathered man, silver haired, the kind of face that carried the weight of the dangerous work he did. Someone who looked like the history books Johnny had read in secret, the ones his father didn’t know about, the ones that talked about what was coming and why.

Elias Hooper was thirty four years old with a red beard and flour on his hands and a laugh that arrived without warning and departed just as fast. He met them at the back of his mill on a Tuesday evening in the last light, having received Maddy’s message through channels Johnny didn’t fully understand and probably wasn’t meant to. He looked at Johnny for a long moment and then he looked at Naomi and then he looked at the space between them which told him everything Maddy’s message hadn’t.

“How old are you son?” he said.

“Sixteen,” Johnny said.

Hooper looked at Naomi. “And you?”

“Fifteen,” she said. Quietly. Steadily.

Hooper nodded slowly. He had the particular stillness of a man who had learned to read situations fast because reading them slow could get people killed. He read this one and apparently found what he was looking for because he stepped back and held the mill door open.

“Come in then,” he said. “Both of you.”

The mill smelled of grain and wood and the particular dusty sweetness of flour that had settled into every surface over years of honest work. Hooper led them to a back room with a table and three chairs and a lamp that he kept turned low out of habit. He sat across from them and folded his hands on the table and looked at Johnny with eyes that were kind and absolutely serious simultaneously.

“Maddy tells me you’re Robert Morgan Brighton’s son,” he said.

“Yes sir.”

“And you understand what you’re doing.”

“Yes sir.”

“Tell me,” Hooper said. “Because I need to hear it from you directly. Not from Maddy. Not from anyone else. From you.”

Johnny told him. All of it. The same truth he’d told Naomi in the candlelit room, stripped of the tender parts, reduced to its bones. He loved her. He intended to marry her. Iowa was the only place in reach where that was legal. He had money for the journey and a homestead stake at the end of it. He understood the risks and had made his choice.

Hooper listened without interrupting. When Johnny finished Hooper was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at Naomi.

“And you?” he said. “This is your choice? Freely made?”

Something moved across Naomi’s face. Not quite a smile. “The first free choice I’ve ever made in my life,” she said. “Yes.”

Hooper nodded. He unfolded his hands and spread them flat on the table.

“All right,” he said. “Here’s what you need to understand before we go any further. What I do — what the people I work with do — is federal crime. The Fugitive Slave Act makes it crime in free states as well as slave states. The people who hunt runaways don’t stop at state lines and neither does your father’s money.” He looked at Johnny directly. “Robert Morgan Brighton will offer a reward. A significant one. Your face is known in two counties at minimum. That’s a problem we need to solve before you take a single step north.”

“How do we solve it?” Johnny asked.

Hooper almost smiled. “You become someone else,” he said. “Both of you. New names. New story. New faces as much as we can manage.” He looked at Naomi. “You’ll travel as his wife initially. Not his servant. Not his property. His wife. In the early stages before we’re clear of Georgia that fiction is more dangerous than the truth but it’s also more mobile. A man traveling with his servant raises questions in certain jurisdictions. A man traveling with his wife raises fewer.”