Free God's Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher Page B

the manse and she’d model her dresses in a private show just for me.
    â€œNeedless to say, son, I swallowed the bait. The very next evening I took her to dinner at the hotel. The following night I squired her to a dance at the town hall. She wore a short, flouncy red dress with matching open-toed heels. Jim, every man at that dance was jealous of me and every woman hated her. And dance? Why, she floated over the floor as if she’d been dancing as long as she’d been walking. Those dark eyes of hers were shy and bold at the same time, and she had what you’d call a fetching accent. Not French. Maybe Eastern European. Actually, I think she was part gypsy.”
    â€œWhat was her name?”
    â€œSophia. Her name was Sophia. I called her Sophie. That night when I took her back to the manse she let me kiss her and mister man, you can just imagine. We made a date to go buggy riding the next afternoon, but when I showed up at the manse with a hired trap from the livery stable—she was gone.”
    â€œGone!” Jim said. Then, despite his resolution not to interrupt, “Gone where?”
    â€œMiss Hark said an urgent telegram had come from Montreal very early that morning. It was bad news. Sophie’s sister had died. Sophie’d left in her black funeral dress, the same one she’d modeled for her customers, and a black veil, on the dawn Flyer. And that was the last I ever heard of her.”
    â€œShe never came back? Or wrote?”
    â€œNope. I went up to Montreal to look for her and pounded the sidewalks of the garment district, but a gypsy, you know, can vanish into thin air in a room with just two people in it, much less a great city.”
    Prof stared at the rushing river. Finally he shrugged. “It couldn’t ever have come to anything, whatever there was between us. Other than the fact that we were both young, we didn’t have a thing in common. I was a village schoolteacher. She was as wild and free as—” Prof flipped the back of his hand toward the falls—“one of those leaping trout.”
    There was so much more that Jim wanted to know, but all Prof said, as they cut back across the field toward the manse, was, “You’ll have to write the story yourself someday, son.”
    â€œHow?” Jim said. “I don’t know the ending.”
    â€œThat’s all right,” Prof said. “Leave it a mystery, then.”
    *   *   *
    Jim finished his last dump run late that afternoon. It looked as though he and Prof might get their fishing in after all, but first Prof wanted to “take a gander” at the carriage shed. Jim slyly asked him what he proposed to do in the shed with a male goose and Prof snatched off his Academy ball cap and made as if to flail his student about the head and shoulders with it. Two good friends and fishing chums, horsing around after a fraught day.
    They didn’t find much in the shed. A one-horse run-around pung, a larger cutter on ornately curved runners that had belonged to Miss Hark’s father. A grain bin next to the door leading to a two-stall stable.
    Jim lifted the heavy lid of the bin and peered inside. Empty. “Maybe this is where the runaway slaves hid,” he said.
    Prof chuckled. “I’d forgotten all about the so-called secret slave chamber. Come on back to the house, Jim. I’ll show you. Then we’ll hit the bridge pool.”
    In the front hallway of the manse, Prof showed Jim a china knob, not much larger than a shooter aggie, in the paneling below the curving staircase. It opened outward, revealing a small space under the stairs. “Harkness and I used to play hide-and-seek in there,” Prof said. “Rumor had it that’s where the fugitive slaves were hidden, but I’ve always been skeptical. There was a saying that here in the Kingdom, the Underground Railroad ran aboveground. Slavecatchers didn’t dare venture up to