Our horses moved slowly—the snow made for awkward footing—and Ben Kreel was silent for a long while. Then he said, “You needn’t conceal your fears, Adam. I know what’s troubling you.” For a moment I had the terrible idea that Ben Kreel had been behind me in the hallway at the Estate, and that he had seen Sam Godwin wrapped in his Old Testament paraphernalia. Wouldn’t that create a scandal! (And then I thought that it was exactly such a scandal Sam must have feared all his life: it was worse even than being Church of Signs, for in some states a Jew can be fined or even imprisoned for practicing his faith. I didn’t know where Athabaska stood on the issue, but I feared the worst.) But Ben Kreel was talking about conscription, not about Sam.

“I’ve already discussed this with some of the boys in town,” he said. “You’re not alone, Adam, if you’re wondering what it all means, this military movement, and what might happen as a result of it. And I admit, you’re something of a special case. I’ve been keeping an eye on you. From a distance, as it were. Here, stop a moment.”

We had come to a rise in the road, on a bluff above the River Pine, looking south toward Williams Ford from a little height.

“Gaze at that,” Ben Kreel said contemplatively. He stretched his arm out in an arc, as if to include not just the cluster of buildings that was the town but the empty fields as well, and the murky flow of the river, and the wheels of the mills, and even the shacks of the indentured laborers down in the low country. The valley seemed at once a living thing, inhaling the crisp atmosphere of the season and breathing out its steams, and a portrait, static in the still blue winter air. As deeply rooted as an oak, as fragile as a ball of Nativity glass.

“Gaze at that,” Ben Kreel repeated. “Look at Williams Ford, laid out pretty there. What is it, Adam?

More than a place, I think. It’s a way of life. It’s the sum of all our labors. It’s what our fathers have given us and it’s what we give our sons. It’s where we bury our mothers and where our daughters will be buried.”