Chapter 5

The pit under the old toll house is a dry cistern with an iron grate over the mouth of it. There is no ladder. You go down on a rope and you come up on a rope and the rope belongs to the magistrate.

Bern Tolliver was standing on the grate when I got there.

He had come up from the wharf with eleven men behind him and he was in the same good coat, and he had been there long enough to have arranged his face. He is not a shouter. That is what makes him dangerous. He has…