There were Frank and Nicole sitting together, with one of their smaller children—Patrick, Auguste thought—squirming on Nicole's lap. The sight of the baby made him want to weep.
There were Elysée and Guichard, two old men sitting side by side. Grandpapa had a home of his own now, he'd told Auguste while visiting him, a small frame house on a hillside north of town, also built by Frank. And a young doctor named Surrey who had just moved into the county looked in on Elysée regularly.
Good that they have a new doctor here.
Too bad, though, Gram Medill had died. Of an infection, Auguste had heard, that she'd refused to let Dr. Surrey treat.
Auguste saw many more spectators whom he did not recognize, people who stared back at him with hostility or—at best—curiosity.
A handsome young woman wearing a black bonnet and a black dress caught his eye. There was a strange intensity in her look, but her mouth was drawn tight, and he could not tell whether she felt hatred or sympathy for him. Then he remembered who she was—Pamela Russell, widow of the town clerk whose brains had been dashed out by a Sauk war club during the attack on Victor. Nicole, on one of her visits to the village hall, had described Russell's death to him and told him how Pamela had insisted on touching off the cannon that broke the war party's attack.
She will probably want to be the one to put the rope around my neck.
The prosecutor called Levi Pope to the stand. The shambling backwoodsman held his coonskin cap in his hand as he approached the witness chair. This was the first time Auguste could remember seeing him without a rifle. Its absence made him look strange.
Bennett led Levi Pope through an account of Old Man's Creek. Then Thomas Ford rose to question him.
"All right, Levi. When the three Indians, including Auguste, came into your camp with the peace flag, how'd you know it was treachery?"