Chapter 2

The October day's clouds had turned leaden, closed out the sun and sprayed a fine mist over the barren land and lonely haystacks. The furrowed fields lay in brown stubble, and the dirt lanes were growing their winter crop of ruts, rocks and mud. With his knees and heels Alexander Beall kept his soggy mare moving along the grassy roadsides as he trotted home. As usual, the main routes around the courthouse were the responsibility of a member of the Clagett family, and Beall made a note in his small book to check on which one had the duty this winter and then to pay him a firm but polite visit. The weedy crowns had not been scraped for months and many of the roadside ditches needed clearing. Being supervisor of roads for the whole southern district of Maryland's Western Reserve gave Beall some four hundred square miles of land and perhaps eighty miles of ways, lanes and minor roads to look after in addition to a large portion of the busy, old route between Frederick and Georgetown that some still called Braddock's road.

The job was Beall's reward for his service as the sheriff of Arnold County, a job in which he had won general respect for evenhandedness but calumny from those who expected favors. Both the Sons of Liberty and less vocal revolutionaries as well as the Loyalists and their landed allies had pressured him to bend rules their way during the five years of conflict. He had never shown partisanship and so had been castigated by hot-heads on both sides as "lukewarm" and a "millstone."

In his own family, most of whom had warmly welcomed Maryland's independence and the futile fight against British rule, Alexander Beall was considered rather soft-hearted and too willing to compromise. "Tried to see both sides of a question that really had jes' one," his Uncle Matthew had said of him. Some had called him a Tory-lover, and there were still a few Bealls, whether they said it "bell" or "beel," that would not speak to him even at weddings or funerals when the huge clan generally gathered. Lloyd Beall, a first cousin who liked being called "captain," was among the leaders of the veterans' organization meeting clandestinely to plot Alexander Beall-knew-not-what, and Lloyd had not spoken to him or to his wife since the war abruptly ended.

Beall's wife welcomed him home with the suggestion that he change his muddy boots and wet britches. He sat on his bed drying his feet and thinking about Elizabeth Clagett and her missing arm. He could see her torn body on the rough boards of the bare kitchen floor, but he could not recall what the woman had on or the exact date of the crime. Much like this, he thought, chilly but not yet hard frozen. He remembered digging the pit where they buried all three of the Clagetts; mother, father and young son. His nephew had been there, his deputy at the time before he went off to serve with the militia in the South. I never talked with him about it, Beall thought as he finished dressing and ran his fingers through his long, wiry hair, pulling it into a narrow ribbon-tie at the back of his head.

"Margaret," he said coming back to his flickering fireplace, "I've got more holes in these stockings. They worth mending?"

"Of course. Put them on top of the basket here so they'll dry. Any news from down at the old courthouse today? 'Spose that's were you've been."

"Roads's in pretty bad shape. Should have noticed that before, but when you're there 'most every day, it's hard to see I guess," Beall glanced toward his wife who was concentrating on her needles. "Tom McNish told me about a killing down in Georgetown that bothered me considerable."

"Well, tell me, Mr. Beall. Don't just sit there smelling like a wet dog."

Beall rocked back on his chair but then brought it down on all four legs when he saw his wife's disapproving glance over her spectacles. He filled his mottled pipe and lit it from the fire with an ember raked out with the wrought iron poker the local smith had made for him. First thing I bought for this house, he recalled as he puffed. His wife kept knitting and waiting. Patience with her large husband's deliberate ways was a long-learned and oft-practiced virtue in her make-up. She could out-wait an icicle, her friends joshed.