Miriam listened without interrupting.
She said the search for the child would require care because the same people hunting Daniel might use his affection as a trap.
Daniel answered that he was beginning to understand the difference between devotion and obedience.
Miriam looked at the thimble and asked whether his mother had taught him to sew.
He smiled despite his exhaustion.
He said she had taught him to mend a sleeve badly enough that she could laugh about it for an entire afternoon.
Josephine arrived the next morning with her children and Rose.
Her younger son was feverish from the journey, and Miriam sent for a local woman who knew how to treat him.
Rose sat beside the boy while his mother slept for the first time in several days.
Daniel helped Thomas hide the wagon under branches and remove the distinctive markings from its side.
They were careful not to destroy anything that might identify the cart if it needed to be returned to Abram.
The driver had risked his own safety, and they would not leave him needlessly exposed.
Miriam invited the adults to discuss where each person wanted to go.
Josephine hoped to find her husband through a church network in Ohio.
Thomas wanted to reach a place where he could work with horses for wages and perhaps help others follow.
Rose had an aunt in Pennsylvania, though she had not received a letter from her in years.
Daniel did not know where he wanted to live.
He knew only that he wanted no more orders sent from Blackwood Manor.
Miriam described a route north that changed at each safe stopping place.
She would not reveal the entire network to people who did not need to know it.
That secrecy was not an insult to their trustworthiness.
It was a way to protect strangers whose lives depended on not being named.
Daniel recognized the distinction from the silence he had endured at Catherine’s hands.
One kind of secrecy preserved a person’s choices.
The other took them away.
At dusk, a rider brought news from Red Creek.
Pike had accused Abram of theft and offered money for the return of the escaped group.
Finch had told the authorities that Daniel was a dangerous man who had abducted the others.
Josephine’s sons heard the accusation and looked toward Daniel in confusion.
He knelt to their height and told them that false stories were often written by people who needed to make their own violence seem reasonable.
