Mister Jack had dropped him off at Harper’s Ferry—you mean Crossing Rock Whiteman—on Christmas morning. He just could not bear to stay at Miss Ann’s because he knew he would never want to leave. He slipped out with Jack in the early morning before the ladies woke. He had grown fond of his buckskins and moccasins and decided to keep them. Jack gave him a ski cap to cover his bald scarred head and a nice brown windbreaker with two hundred bucks and some change in the inside vest pocket. This parting and his previous goodbye with Jack had both been good ones, and he was thinking that Jack was a lucky man for someone to know.

The Lower Town was deserted. It felt like a crisp dry autumn morning as he walked down Market Street to the footpath. He continued on the footpath toward the low bank beneath the point and stopped when the chill went up his spine; the chill that told him he was standing where Sarge and that genetically-engineered freak Ramirez had killed each other in late September of 1538. Not a tree here was old enough to have been a witness to that.

Was it all just a trip through a dream machine? Did any of this really happen?

He looked up the Shenandoah at the ford where he had led Don Tinoco’s column across. He could see their bearded faces, hear the leather of their harnesses creak, their mail ‘shink’ and ‘slink’, the horses clomp and snort, the hounds whine. He now knew what he had to do to lay these ghosts to rest.

He walked up High Street which followed the path he had taken to raise Sarge on his scaffold; the way he had also led the conquistadors on their doomed search for gold. A single older man swept the stoop of a bed-and-breakfast that apparently had some customers. Otherwise he was alone but for his haunting reveries.

The world is so much uglier now.

After an hour or so of wandering the terraced streets he finally came to the site where they had raised Sarge on his scaffold. The overlook was now occupied by a church of some kind. He sat with his back up against the stone wall and looked out over the Potomac—the Wild-Goose-River Whiteman; invader.

He thought he could hear an organ playing within the building, but thought again—there is no one about. You are alone hillbilly.

He had slept little the night before, so even though he had planned on sitting for just a few minutes before heading up to Bolivar Heights and the site of Don Tinoco’s camp in that other past, he nodded off quickly in the faint warmth of the morning sun…

…He was standing naked in the cold surf as the sand retreated under his feet. He could see Isrаel Heft’s sloop bobbing off shore in the dim silhouette cast by the moon. Toward the small ship a launch pushed through the swells just beyond the surf. He could see himself sitting there shackled next to Black Tim. He then thought to his other ghostly self, Enjoy the life at sea boy. It won’t last long enough.

A horse’s pain-filled snort brought him from his lost world within. Beneath him floundered Johnny Hardtack’s old nag, the horse of the man who had sold him to Isrаel Heft. The man himself was a mere lump of fat-stuffed clothing submerged beneath the incoming tide. The corrupt customs official—or whatever they were called in Georgian England—had drowned beneath his own fallen horse.

The horse was an old mare, and had managed to lay her head on the fat body of her dead master, keeping her nostrils momentarily above the incoming tide. She glared up at him with a crazed and accusatory eye. When she barred her worn and yellowed teeth he expected just a whine or a snort. But melancholy words were the sounds that issued from her mouth; words spoken in the voice of a pitiful elderly woman, a woman that sounded a lot like Ma Bracken had after Pap had been buried in the cave-in. “Why me hound-eyed man, why? I too was a slave to him who sold you, suffering under his ill-gotten weight even as my old back bent also under the weight of years.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think…”

“Why me, why break my old aching foreleg? Bad enough it was before your cruel kick.”

Unformed words caught in his throat. She looked searchingly at him and then batted her old eye-lid when the surf began to wash over her head. He squatted under her and held her nostrils above the sea foam. Just as the tide began to retreat he leaped over her and dragged her by the saddle up the beach, one painful inch at a time, pulling with all of his considerable strength. The tide came back in now with a vengeance, as if claiming a soul about to be denied the Deep. The wave itself was up to his chest. He cradled her head in his arms to keep her nostrils above the water…

…Wave after wave covered them, until she no longer snorted or opened her salt-crusted eyes, and her body became heavy and slack. He was still determined to drag her up to dry land. As he strained for one last leg-burning effort he was buried by a wall of water and sand…

…Thunder beat in his head as he slowly came to consciousness. He was walking across the cobblestone courtyard of a castle. The thunder in his head was the ringing of the massive hooves that clomped next to him; the steel-shod hooves of an armored Clydesdale marching on either side of him. He was chained at the waist to both of their saddles.

He walked between them to a granite staircase atop which waited King Phillip. The disembodied neck and head of the black charger appeared to sprout from the crimson throne. King Phillip had been Don Andre’s faithful warhorse. He had led them all into a nightmare ambush, slaying his friend Don Andre in the last act of the massacre. On either side of King Phillip levitated the severed heads of his six slain mares, butchered by the blood-mad Cherokee, Iroquois, Shawnee, Potomac and allied warriors when the base camp was finally overrun…

The tower above was black, and the sky above that gray streaked with red. The Clydesdales placed one steel-shod hoof each behind his knees to force him to kneel before their king. Phillip tossed his full flowing mane of black once, bared his great white teeth, and then leaned forward. When he spoke his voice was different somehow from the last time. The voice of the great warhorse seemed to consist of the myriad sounds made by the 200 dying horses on that day of slaughter, when he had turned on them like a rabid dog with 2,000 warriors at his back. “Huntsmen, your sins against horse-kind seem boundless. An old mare even fails to find that lone drop of mercy that lies in the deep well of your blackened soul!”

He heard an awkward clomp of hooves on stone as he hung his head in shame. When at last the three hooves ceased their hollow clamor he raised his head to look up into the unforgiving eyes of Johnny Hardtack’s old mare. In the background he could here 200 voices call out. They sounded like thunder alternately rumbling and cracking, “No mercy for the huntsmen. Grind his bones to make our feed. No mercy for the huntsmen. Grind his…”

He woke in a cold sweat in the dim morning sun. He was shivering up against the base of the church wall. The sound of the ugly locomotive and aging railcars rumbling along the tracks along the river below seemed to him the clomping of hooves on cobblestones receding into the distance.

Get it together dummy. You can’t sleep around here, its haunted.

He brushed himself off, dried the sweat off of his neck with Jack’s bandana, and pressed the rest of his sweat into his buckskins so it could evaporate while he walked. He tried as best he could to get the ‘daymare’ behind him. But it haunted him terribly. He had sat down there hoping to have warm thoughts of Sarge barking harsh orders, only to pat him on the back in the end. Sarge had not come to him.