Soul Catcher by Michael C. White

inhospitable, cold and gray and foreboding, with its disheveled huts, and the gray skies and the dark mountains looming ominously in the distance. In the middle of the village, a bark-covered limb stuck out of the muddy ground at an angle, with a tattered red rag at the top flapping in the breeze. Cain supposed it was some sort of pennant to remind the former slaves of their freed status, but it seemed more a sign of bloody surrender than anything else.
    "My pappy, may he rest in hell," Preacher offered, "said a darkie ain't got the sense of your average dog. Leastways a dog knows not to shit where it eats."
    "It do look like hard land to farm," Little Strofe added.
    "Fact is, without somebody behind him with a whip, your nigger's just plain lazy as a hog," said Preacher, spitting tobacco juice on the ground.
    Like the Gist Settlement out in Ohio and Fort Mose down in Florida, Timbucto was a settlement where freed and runaway slaves were welcomed to come and live. A wealthy abolitionist named Gerrit Smith had provided the land to any Negro who wished to work it. The man had conceived of it as a place where they could make their own way, separate from whites but still here in America, unlike those that advocated a forced return to Liberia for all freed blacks. It was, Cain felt, a pathetic and wrongheaded attempt by white northerners who didn't know the first thing about the Negro temperament, an endeavor doomed to failure. He had to agree with Preacher on this point. Everyone knew your Negro was no more capable of living independently than, say, a four-year-old child. And he wondered why any black would choose this sort of life over that of being on an orderly, well-tended farm down south. It didn't make sense to him. Then again, if slaves were rational he'd be out of a job.
    From his saddlebags, Cain took out his brass spyglass and scoped the village. With the steady rain he saw little activity there save for the occasional trip to an outhouse or to a barn for milking their few scrawny cows or to the henhouse to collect eggs. He didn't see any sign of the runaways. The four men waited and watched all day. When it grew dark, they rode deeper into the woods to make camp that night beneath an outcropping of rock that offered them some feeble respite from the savage rain. They lit a fire and cooked their supper. Nearby ran a stream from which they watered their horses.
    "I don't m-much fancy this place," Little Strofe said as he ate.
    "What you w-worried about?" Preacher taunted, making fun of his stammer. "You think them n-niggers is gonna come and get you?"
    "Brother here always been skeersome of darkies," Strofe said.
    "That's a lie."
    "Hit's true. They usta be this nigger work for Mr. Jacobs, the undertaker man in town. Brother wouldn't even cross in front of his place. And if he heard the cock crow in the middle of the night, he wouldn't go out and do his business on account he was 'scart some darky would snatch him up."
    "Woo," said Preacher, making his eyes wide and furling out his lips. He ambled like an ape toward Little Strofe. "Them darkies gonna git you tonight."
    "I ain't a'scart a no niggers," Little Strofe said, embarrassed. "I'm just s-sayin' I be glad when we git what we come for and can leave." He looked over at Cain. "You like this place, Mr. Cain?"
    "Not particularly," he offered, looking up from his plate of corn pone and dried beef.
    "See. He don't c-care none for it neither."
    Preacher glanced at Little Strofe and said, "Never seen such a pair a old biddies in all my born days. You with your d-damn singin' and him with his readin'." Cain glanced over at Preacher.
    "Least I can read," he said.
    "I can read just fine," Preacher scoffed. "What I needs to. Not some damn pomes. Hell, Cain, you're like some dried-up old schoolmarm with your nose always in a book. And when it ain't in a book, you're picklin' your brain with what'all's in that flask a your'n."
    "You just mind your own damn business,