The hood lay folded on the chair beside her.
White linen pressed smooth as a wedding veil.
Abigail Price sat motionless in the clan hall on a November night in 1868.
Her hands bound with the same rope her father used to tie tobacco sheav.
15 ft away, Jacob hung by his wrists from the ceiling beam, his shirt stripped away, back unmarked.
Not yet.
Malcolm Price circled him slowly, boots echoing on pine planks, explaining to the assembled robed figures why death would be too merciful.
The air smelled of lamp oil and sweat and something metallic that hadn’t entered the room yet.
What Malcolm didn’t know was that his daughter had already memorized the names of every man present.
What Jacob didn’t know was that the brand Malcolm would press into his shoulder within the hour carried a design that would save his life and doom theirs.
What none of them knew was that this night wasn’t an ending, but the beginning of a hunt that would span three counties and five years.
Malcolm Price had built his life on certainty.
the eldest son of a tobacco planter who’d lost everything to Sherman’s torches, he’d clawed back respectability through calculated marriages, strategic land purchases, and an unshakable conviction that God had ordained hierarchies of blood.
By 1866, he owned 400 acres outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama, employed 14 sharecroers, and served as exalted Cyclops.
the county clan’s highest officer, though members called him wizard for his talent at orchestrating night rides that left no evidence for federal marshals.
His daughter Abigail turned 17 in the spring of 1867.
She had her dead mother’s auburn hair and her father’s sharp features, a face that strangers called handsome rather than pretty.
Malcolm raised her with the same precision he applied to clan ritual.
Morning Bible study, afternoon lessons in household management, evening readings from pamphlets about racial purity and southern restoration.
He never remarried after consumption claimed his wife in 1864.
Abigail was proof enough of his legacy, he told visitors, a daughter who understood her duty to preserve the bloodline he’d spent a lifetime defending.
The Price House sat on a low hill above the Warrior River, a two-story structure of whitewashed clapboard with a wide porch and shutters painted Confederate gray.
Behind it stood the tobacco barn, the smokehouse, and a row of cabins where the sharecroers lived under contracts that kept them perpetually indebted.
Malcolm allowed no enslaved people on his property after emancipation.
He called it principal.
In practice, he’d sold his six remaining workers to a Mississippi plantation in April of 1865.
Pocketing cash before the 13th Amendment could finalize their freedom.
But one man had come with the land when Malcolm purchased the adjoining Carter property in January 1868.
Jacob had been Carter’s house servant, literate and skilled at carpentry.
The sale contract listed him as Freriedman labor, bound by a 10-year work agreement that Carter’s widow couldn’t afford to maintain.
Malcolm accepted him reluctantly, assigned him to the tobacco barn, and forbade him from entering the main house.
Abigail first spoke to Jacob in March when she brought water to the barn on a humid afternoon.
He was replacing rotted floorboards, working with the focused silence of someone who’d learned not to draw attention.
She noticed the book tucked into his coat, its spine visible when he bent to measure a plank.
“Can you read that?” she asked.
Jacob didn’t look up.
“Yes, miss.
What is it?” “Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas.
got it from a missionary teacher before the Carters sold me here.
Abigail set the water bucket down carefully.
My father would burn that if he found it.
I know, miss.
That’s why he won’t find it.
She should have left then.
Malcolm’s rules were absolute.
No conversations with field hands beyond instructions.
No acknowledgement of their interior lives.
No recognition that they might possess thoughts worth considering.
But something in Jacob’s quiet certainty made her pause.
He was perhaps 25, tall and lean, with hands that moved over the wood with the precision of someone who understood how things fit together.
“Do you have other books?” she asked.
“Had a few.” “Lost them when the Carters sold me.” “I have books,” Abigail said.
She hadn’t planned to say it.
The words simply arrived.
If you wanted to borrow one.
Jacob finally looked at her, his expression unreadable.
Why would you do that, miss? Because, Abigail said slowly, “I think my father’s certainties might be lies.
” They met twice a week through the spring and summer of 1868, always in the hoft after Malcolm wrote out on clan business.
Abigail brought her mother’s Bible first.
Then volumes of poetry her father considered acceptable for women.
Then finally the books she’d hidden in her wardrobe.
Texts she’d bought with egg money from peddlers who asked no questions.
Political treatises.
Abolitionist memoirs.
A water-damaged copy of Uncle Tom’s cabin that someone had abandoned in a churchyard.
Jacob read voraciously, his fingercracing lines as he absorbed arguments Abigail herself had only half understood until she heard them spoken aloud in his careful baritone.
They debated theology, history, the question of whether violence could ever be justified against oppression.
Sometimes they simply read in companionable silence.
The only sound, the whisper of turning pages and the distant call of mourning doves in the pines.
Malcolm Price noticed nothing.
He was consumed that summer with clan strategy, organizing resistance to Republican governance and the federal troops still stationed in Alabama’s major towns.
The clan operated in careful layers.
social clubs on the surface, armed nightriders underneath, and beneath that, a network of judges, sheriffs, and landowners who ensured prosecution never reached the guilty.
July 4th, 1868.
Clan Ledger, entry 73.
Tuscaloosa chapter, 42 active members, six probationary.
Federal presence requires operational discipline.
No whippings within city limits.
Rural targets only.
Abigail copied her father’s records whenever he left them unsecured, memorizing names and dates in case she ever needed them.
She wasn’t sure yet what she was preparing for, only that knowledge might someday become a weapon.
In August, the lessons changed.
Jacob’s hand brushed hers while reaching for the same book, and neither of them pulled away.
The touch lasted three heartbeats, four long enough for the world to shift beneath them.
Abigail felt her pulse in her throat.
Jacob closed his eyes briefly, as if steadying himself against a decision whose consequences he’d already calculated.
“This is dangerous,” he said quietly.
“I know.
Your father would kill me.
I know that, too.
Then why? Abigail looked at him directly because I’ve spent 17 years learning to hate and I think I’m tired of it.
They became lovers in September in the Hoft where they’d spent months discussing philosophy.
It was awkward and urgent and terrifying.
Two people crossing a boundary that society had built into law, custom, and ritual.
Afterward, they lay in the scattered hay, listening to the tobacco leaves rustling in the drying racks below.
Both understanding they’d committed an act that could destroy them.
The scripture says we’re abominations, Abigail whispered.
“The scripture says a lot of things,” Jacob replied.
“Doesn’t make them true.
They met 11 more times over the next six weeks.
Each encounter deepened their complicity, wound them tighter into a conspiracy they both knew couldn’t last.
Abigail began leaving the house wearing two dresses, the outer one discarded in the barn.
Jacob learned the exact rhythm of Malcolm’s departures, the patterns that gave them two hours, sometimes three.
But patterns attract attention.
And in a household where control was religion, even small deviations registered as threats.
Malcolm Price returned early on November 7th, 1868.
He’d ridden to a clan gathering in Greensboro, but the meeting had been postponed when federal troops were spotted on the Huntsville Road.
He came home through the back fields, leading his horse quietly, already thinking about the report he’d need to send to the state leadership in Montgomery.
He noticed the lamp burning in the tobacco barn.
Not unusual, Jacob often worked late, but something about the quality of the light drew Malcolm’s attention.
Too steady for someone moving around, too focused in one corner.
He tied his horse to the fence and approached on foot.
his hand instinctively moving to the pistol he carried beneath his coat.
The barn door was unlatched.
Malcolm pushed it open slowly, letting his eyes adjust to the lamplight filtering down from the loft.
He heard voices low and intimate.
Unmistakably, his daughter’s laugh followed by a man’s murmured response.
The sound froze him for perhaps 3 seconds while his mind constructed and rejected explanations.
Then he climbed the ladder.
What he saw would later be described in whispers across three counties, though no one who repeated the story had been present.
Malcolm Price, exalted Cyclops of the Tuscaloosa clan, discovered his daughter in the hoft with a black man, their clothes scattered, the Bible Abigail had brought lying open to the Song of Solomon.
Jacob moved first, reaching for his shirt.
Malcolm pulled the pistol and aimed it with the steady hand of someone who’d done this before on different nights in different barns.
But he didn’t fire.
The calculations happening behind his eyes were visible in the lamplight.
A man trained in theatrics recognizing that immediate violence would waste an opportunity.
“Get dressed,” he said, his voice perfectly leveled.
“Both of you.” Abigail pulled her dress on with shaking hands.
Jacob dressed slowly, his gaze fixed on Malcolm, already understanding that survival required absolute stillness.
Malcolm gestured toward the ladder with the pistol.
Down the wagons outside.
You’re both coming with me.
Where? Abigail asked, but her voice cracked on the word.
To church, Malcolm said.
His smile contained no warmth whatsoever.
We’re going to have a prayer meeting.
The clan met in a structure they called the temple.
A converted tobacco warehouse three miles outside Tuscaloosa proper, accessible only by a ruted track through pine forest.
Malcolm sent Jacob ahead in the wagon bed, hands bound, while Abigail sat beside her father on the bench, a pistol resting casually in his lap.
Neither of them spoke during the 30inut journey.
The moon was 3 days past full, providing enough light to navigate without lanterns.
When they arrived, Malcolm lit no warning fires.
Instead, he sent a boy, probably 12, whose family sharecropped Malcolm’s South 40, to ride a circuit and summon the chapter’s leadership.
The inner circle, he called them.
The men who made decisions that ordinary members simply carried out.
They arrived in ones and twos over the next two hours, 11 men total, each dawning the white robe and hood stored in the temple’s back room.
Malcolm made them wait until midnight, understanding that ritual timing mattered, that what happened next needed the weight of ceremony.
Jacob hung from the ceiling beam by ropes around his wrists, his toes just touching the floor.
Malcolm had stripped his shirt but left his trousers, creating the image of a man suspended between dignity and degradation.
Abigail sat on a straightbacked chair 15 ft away, unhooded, but surrounded by the assembled figures in white.
Her hands were bound but loosely, more symbol than restraint.
Malcolm stood at the front, his own hood pushed back so his face was visible.
a preacher addressing his congregation.
He spoke for 20 minutes, his voice rising and falling with practiced cadence, building a sermon around betrayal, bloodline, and the necessity of making examples that would resonate beyond a single night.
Brothers, we are gathered to witness the wages of corruption.
This man, this creature has defiled my daughter, has polluted the bloodline we are sworn to protect.
The question before us is simple.
How do we ensure this lesson echoes? One of the robed figures suggested immediate execution.
Another proposed castration and public display.
Malcolm let them speak, building consensus through the appearance of debate while steering them toward the conclusion he’d already reached.
“Death is mercy,” he said finally.
“This man will live.
But he will live as a warning.
From a leather case, Malcolm withdrew a branding iron, its business end shaped into a design the assembled men recognized immediately.
The clan’s symbol modified with additional marks that designated property, ownership, permanent marking.
He will carry our sign on his flesh, Malcolm announced.
and he will be sold to the harshest camp I can find where his survival will depend on demonstrating this mark to every clan chapter between here and Texas.
He will live as owned as marked as a creature who can never escape the fact that he touched what was forbidden.
The brand was heated in a portable brazier Malcolm had prepared earlier.
The room filled with the smell of hot iron and pine smoke.
Jacob’s face remained expressionless, a stillness that Malcolm seemed to find infuriating.
When the iron was glowing orange, Malcolm approached slowly, savoring the theater.
What he pressed into Jacob’s left shoulder was not the mark he’d shown the assembly.
In the split second before contact, Malcolm substituted a different iron, one he’d concealed in the braier’s depths, bearing a design that looked similar, but contained subtle variations.
A fake brand crude enough to seem authentic to casual inspection, but carrying signals that clan members trained in the organization’s internal codes would recognize as forgery.
It was Malcolm’s insurance policy.
A man marked with a false brand would be suspected, questioned, possibly detained by clan chapters in other regions, but not immediately killed.
They’d hold him, try to verify his story, send inquiries back to Tuscaloosa.
It would create months, perhaps years of controlled suffering, a living testimony to Malcolm’s power.
Jacob made no sound when the iron burned into his skin.
Abigail screamed for him.
After the branding, Malcolm staged what he called a trial.
Though the verdict had been determined before the first question, he forced Abigail to sit hooded now, a white linen covering that transformed her into just another robed witness, making her complicit in the spectacle of Jacob’s destruction.
The questioning followed clan ritual.
three interrogators, each asking scripted questions designed to establish guilt and reinforce hierarchy.
Jacob was required to answer yes or no to accusations phrased as certainties.
You seduced the daughter of a white man.
Yes or no? Jacob’s voice was steady.
No.
You defiled her willingly.
Yes or no? She came willingly.
We both did.
This provoked a murmur among the robed figures.
Malcolm raised his hand for silence.
The creature admits to conspiracy.
Then he corrupted her thinking, poisoned her mind with abolitionist lies until she could no longer distinguish right from wrong.
Through the hood’s eyeholes, Abigail could see her father constructing the narrative that would follow them both.
She would be the innocent victim, a girl led astray by a man who’d exploited her Christian charity.
Jacob would be the predator, the eternal justification for every law that kept black men away from white women on pain of death.
What Malcolm didn’t see was the slight gesture Jacob made with his bound hands, a signal Abigail had taught him weeks earlier, using the same Bible they’d read together.
Three fingers extended, then closed.
The sign that meant remember, that meant survive, that meant this isn’t over.
The trial concluded near in the morning.
Malcolm announced his sentence.
Jacob would be sold to Red Fern Work Camp in Mississippi, a notorious site where convict labor built levies along the river.
The mortality rate there was 70% within 2 years.
calculated not from mercy but from financial reports Malcolm had read in his capacity as county land assessor.
But first, Malcolm decreed, Jacob would be displayed.
For 3 days, Jacob was kept in a cage outside the temple, barely large enough for him to sit upright.
Clan members came to observe him, some bringing their sons to witness what happened to those who violated the natural order.
A few threw stones.
Most simply stared, their silence more damaging than words.
Abigail was confined to her room in the Price House, locked from the outside.
Her meals brought by a sharecropper’s wife who’d been instructed not to speak.
Malcolm visited her once each evening, sitting in the chair beside her bed, explaining in calm, paternal tones how he was protecting her reputation, how the story being circulated was that Jacob had attempted assault and been caught before the act could be completed.
“You’ll thank me eventually,” he said on the second night.
When you’re married to a good man, when you have children who carry unstained blood, you’ll understand I did this out of love.
Abigail said nothing.
She’d learned from Jacob the power of silence.
The way refusal to engage could be its own form of resistance.
On the fourth day, November 11th, 1868, a slave trader named Hoskins arrived with cash and transport.
Jacob was sold for $120, loaded into a wagon with five other men purchased from various sources, and driven west toward Mississippi.
Malcolm watched the wagon disappear down the Tuscaloosa road, his expression satisfied.
He’d turned a disaster into a demonstration, a personal shame into a public lesson.
The chapter members who’d witnessed the trial were already spreading the story, embellishing details, ensuring that every black man in the county understood the price of ambition.
What he didn’t notice was Abigail at her locked window, tracing letters on the glass with her finger, spelling out verses from revelations in condensed script that would vanish when the sun hit the pain.
She was already planning The Red Fern work camp sprawled across 200 acres of Mississippi Delta bottomland, a maze of muddy channels and half-built levies where convict labor worked under armed guards who cared nothing for federal occupation policies.
The camp’s operator, a former Confederate colonel named Teague, had profitable contracts with the state and enough political connections to ignore most oversight.
Jacob arrived in mid- November, one of 30 new workers Teague had purchased that month.
The conditions were methodically brutal.
16-our days, insufficient food, beatings for any perceived slowness.
Men died from exhaustion, disease, injury, exposure.
The bodies were buried in unmarked ditches along the levy line, but Jacob had the mark.
3 days after his arrival, a guard noticed the brand on his shoulder while distributing morning rations.
The design triggered protocol.
Suspicious marks were reported to the camp’s clan liaison, a sergeant named Byron, who handled communication with chapters across the region.
Burn examined the brand carefully, his finger tracing the lines burned into Jacob’s skin.
It was close to authentic, close enough to fool most observers, but Burn had been trained in the organization’s internal codes.
He noted the angle of the cross, the spacing of the stars, subtle deviations that marked it as either a forgery or a mark from a rogue chapter operating outside official sanction.
“Who burned this into you?” Burn asked.
“Malcolm Price, Tuscaloosa chapter.” Jacob kept his voice flat, offering information without emotion.
What did you do? I was with his daughter.
Burn’s expression shifted to something between amusement and calculation.
And he didn’t kill you outright.
Interesting.
Stay here.
Over the following week, Byron sent three inquiries back to Tuscaloosa, requesting verification of Jacob’s story and explanation for the Mark’s irregularities.
Malcolm’s responses were delayed, vague, suggesting the matter was sensitive, and involved family honor.
The ambiguity kept Jacob in a strange liinal space, too dangerous to kill immediately, too suspicious to ignore.
Teague assigned him to lighter duty away from the main work crews while the bureaucratic investigation dragged on.
Jacob was given maintenance tasks around the camp perimeter, repairing tools, reinforcing the guard stations.
It was still brutal labor, but it kept him alive when others were dying in the mud, and it gave him access to information.
The guards talked freely around men they considered property.
Jacob learned about clan movements across Mississippi and Alabama.
Heard names of chapter officers.
Absorbed details about which plantations still operated outside federal law, which towns were safe for night rides, which judges could be relied upon to dismiss charges.
He also learned about the communication networks.
The clan used encoded messages passed through fraternal organizations, telegraph offices with sympathetic operators, even black couriers who were paid or coerced into carrying sealed letters.
It was a system designed to be invisible to federal authorities, but comprehensive enough to coordinate action across hundreds of miles.
Jacob began memorizing everything.
Names, locations, passwords, ritual phrases.
He kept it all in his head, a mental ledger of every piece of information that might someday be weaponized.
Four months into his time at Redern, a letter arrived for him.
It came through official channels marked as correspondence from a Christian charity organization.
Teague’s clerk, who handled such deliveries, barely glanced at it before passing it along.
Few convict laborers received mail, and when they did, it was usually from reform societies writing generic encouragements.
The letter was from someone named Ruth, addressed to Jacob at Red Fern Work Camp.
It opened with Bible verses, Romans 12, about overcoming evil with good.
The text was innocuous, the kind of religious comfort any missionary might send to a suffering man.
But certain words were emphasized in slightly darker ink.
When Jacob isolated them and read them in sequence, they spelled out a message.
Your name is known.
Help is coming.
trust the pattern.
The signature was elaborate, ornate, the kind of flourish a woman might use.
But within the curlic, Jacob recognized the same three-finger gesture he’d made in the clan hall, the signal Abigail had taught him.
She’d found him.
Abigail Price had been married off in January of 1869 to Thomas Garrett, a clan officer from the Montgomery chapter, a widowerower in his 40s who owned a cotton factoring business and needed a wife to manage his household.
Malcolm arranged the match with his usual precision, selecting a man whose loyalty to the organization was absolute and whose personality was rigid enough to control a daughter Malcolm described as temporarily unsettled by recent trauma.
Garrett’s house in Montgomery was larger than Malcolm’s.
A three-story townhouse near the commercial district, staffed by four freedman servants working under contracts that might as well have been bondage.
Abigail was installed as mistress with instructions to produce children quickly and restore her reputation through dutiful domesticity.
She played the role Malcolm expected.
She attended church twice weekly, hosted tees for the wives of other clan officers, embroidered pillowcases with the Confederate battle flag, and submitted to her husband’s demands without protest.
To outside observers, she was the model of southern womanhood, recovering from an unfortunate incident.
But in the rare hours when Garrett was occupied with business or clan meetings, Abigail constructed a parallel existence.
She began writing letters, hundreds of them, addressed to charitable organizations, reform societies, church missions, abolition groups.
Most went unanswered or received prefuncter responses.
But a few connected with networks that still existed despite emancipation’s legal end to slavery.
Networks of people who understood that freedom on paper meant nothing without resources, protection, and information.
Through a Methodist missionary society in Mobile, Abigail learned that convict labor camps operated as barely disguised slavery.
That men were purchased from courts and jails under fabricated charges, worked to death, and buried in anonymous ditches.
The society kept informal records, tracking which camps were most brutal, which operators were most corrupt.
Red Fern was on their list.
Abigail began embedding messages in Bible verses, a code she and Jacob had developed during their Hoff meetings.
Certain books of scripture corresponded to concepts.
Romans for revenge, Psalms for patience, Revelations for plans, emphasized words within verses spelled out instructions or information.
To anyone casually reading the letters, they appeared to be exactly what they claimed, religious encouragement from a charitable southern lady to a suffering convict laborer.
But Jacob understood them perfectly.
Over 6 months, Abigail sent him 12 letters.
Through them, she conveyed a map of the clan structure in central Alabama, the names of men who’d been present at his trial, the locations of meeting sites, the passwords used to identify members across chapters.
She couldn’t free him directly, couldn’t storm Red Fern with federal troops, couldn’t dismantle the system that held him, but she could arm him with knowledge, and knowledge was the only weapon a marked man could carry undetected.
What would you do if every letter you sent might be intercepted, every word scrutinized for sedition? Would you risk it? Would you believe someone was reading between the lines, translating your desperate faith into strategy? Abigail also began documenting her father’s activities.
Garrett’s position gave her access to social events where clan leadership gathered, meetings disguised as veteran societies or fraternal organizations.
She attended on her husband’s arm, smiling and silent, absorbing conversations about planned raids, political targets, troublesome freedman who needed correction.
She kept the records in a hollowedout Bible, another one she’d purchased with hoarded money, writing in the blank pages at the end of Revelations, in the same condensed script she’d used on her bedroom window.
names, dates, crimes, evidence that would mean nothing in Alabama courts controlled by men like her father and husband.
But that might someday somehow find its way to authorities who cared.
Her husband never looked in her Bible.
That was women’s territory, private devotion, not something men of his status concerned themselves with.
By summer of 1869, two patterns were becoming clear.
First, clan chapters across Alabama and Mississippi were reporting strange incidents.
Members disappearing during rural night rides, bodies found with signs of ambush, passwords compromised, meeting sites discovered by federal troops who shouldn’t have known they existed.
Second, Abigail was pregnant.
The first man died in April of 1869, though no one connected it to Jacob until much later.
His name was Samuel Hendris, a Tuscaloosa chapter member who’d been part of the assembly that witnessed Jacob’s branding.
Hris was a tobacco merchant who frequently traveled between Alabama and Mississippi on business.
He disappeared on a rural road outside Meridian.
His horse found wandering loose.
His body located 3 days later in a ravine.
The official cause of death was determined to be a fall from his mount complicated by head trauma.
The clan chapter in Meridian conducted their own investigation, suspecting foul play, but found no evidence of robbery or assault.
What they didn’t find was the slip of paper tucked into Hendrick’s boot, written in the same Bible code Abigail had taught Jacob, listing the man’s crimes in abbreviated form, present at trial, voted for sale through stones.
The second death came in June.
Walter Sims, another Tuscaloosa member, a lawyer who’d served as one of the three interrogators during Jacob’s mock trial.
Sims was found in his office in Selma, slumped over his desk, dead from what the local doctor called heart failure.
He was 42, in adequate health, no prior cardiac symptoms.
The doctor noted one curiosity.
Sims’s left hand had been positioned carefully, three fingers extended, the rest closed, as if he’d been trying to signal something in his final moments, or as if someone had arranged it that way.
August brought the third death.
Calvin Root, the clansman who’d first suggested immediate execution during Jacob’s trial, was killed during what appeared to be a robbery on the Montgomery Road.
His wallet was missing, his horse stolen, his body left in the ditch.
Montgomery authorities filed it as banditry, common enough in a region still destabilized by occupation and reconstruction politics.
But the clan’s internal network was beginning to notice the pattern.
Three men, all connected to the same incident, all dead within four months.
Chapter leaders sent cautious inquiries to each other, comparing notes, trying to determine if federal authorities were targeting them or if they faced something else.
Malcolm Price received a letter in September from the state clan leadership requesting a detailed report on the Jacob case and the whereabouts of the man he’d sold.
Malcolm provided what he knew, that Jacob was at Red Fern under observation, marked with the brand that should ensure his permanent monitoring.
But when the leadership contacted Red Fern directly, Teague’s response was unsettling.
Jacob was still there, yes, still working.
But Teague had noticed him being absent from his sleeping quarters on several nights, missing during headcounts.
returning before dawn with explanations about illness or work assignments that couldn’t be fully verified.
Bern, the clan liaison, had even questioned Jacob directly, suspecting he might be attempting escape.
But Jacob always had plausible answers, always showed up for inspections, always demonstrated enough compliance to avoid severe punishment.
It was as if he’d learned to exist in the gaps of the system.
Present enough to avoid suspicion, absent enough to move.
In October, two more Tuscaloosa chapter members died.
Both were killed in separate incidents.
One in a barnfire that might have been accidental, another from a fall down a well on his own property.
Neither death looked like murder when examined individually, but five deaths, all connected to one trial, all within six months.
The clan’s response was predictable.
They tightened security, changed passwords, moved meeting sites, instituted new identification protocols.
They also decided to eliminate the most obvious problem.
A message was sent to Redern.
Execute the marked man.
Bury him quietly.
Reported as disease or escape attempt.
Make sure he’s dead.
Teague received the order on November 1st, 1869.
He assembled three guards, armed them with rifles, and went to find Jacob.
The workshed where Jacob was supposed to be repairing tools was empty.
His few possessions were gone.
The door was unlatched, swinging slightly in the November wind.
Jacob had vanished the night before, walking away from Red Fern with nothing but the clothes on his back and a mental map of every clan member within 200 miles.
The hunt was about to reverse.
Jacob moved through the Alabama countryside like a man who’d been marked for death and decided to become death himself.
The brand on his shoulder, the false mark Malcolm had burned into his skin, believing it would ensure eternal suffering, had become Jacob’s camouflage.
It gave him access to information, allowed him to approach clan members with a story about being sent on internal business, about carrying messages from leadership.
The fake brand’s irregularities, the subtle flaws that were supposed to trigger suspicion actually enhanced his credibility.
Clansmen who examined it assumed he was from a rural chapter that didn’t have access to proper equipment.
A member from some backwoods operation trying to prove his loyalty.
The organization was sprawling, poorly coordinated despite its rhetoric of unity.
No one could keep track of every chapter, every member.
And Jacob had spent a year at Red Fern memorizing the passwords, the ritual phrases, the signs that identified brothers in the cause.
He could speak their language fluently.
His first deliberate killing happened in December of 1869 near the town of Utah.
The target was James Marorrow, a Tuscaloosa member who’d been present at the trial and had volunteered to heat the branding iron.
Jacob tracked him to a rural inn where Mara was conducting business, waited until he left for the road back to his plantation, then ambushed him at a creek crossing.
The method was careful, efficient.
Jacob made it look like a horse accident.
The animal spooked, the rider thrown, the skull cracked against a tree root.
He took nothing except a small leather notebook Marorrow carried, which contained names and addresses of other chapter members.
Before leaving, Jacob positioned Marorrow’s hand in the three-finger signal, his signature, his claim, his message to anyone who understood what they were seeing.
He was methodical about targets, selecting men who’d been active participants in his trial, who’d voted for his sale, who’d come to observe him in the cage.
He avoided anyone who’d expressed doubt or abstained from the worst cruelties.
This wasn’t indiscriminate revenge.
It was precise accounting.
Between killings, Jacob moved constantly, sleeping in abandoned structures, hunting small game, stealing clothes from washing lines to vary his appearance.
He avoided towns where federal troops were stationed, stayed away from main roads, kept to the network of paths and shortcuts that enslaved people had used for generations to navigate Alabama invisibly.
And he kept receiving Abigail’s letters.
She’d found a way to route them through a different system now using contacts in the Methodist missionary network who delivered correspondents to Freriedman communities across the region.
The letters still arrived encoded in scripture, but the information they contained had evolved.
Now Abigail was sending him detailed intelligence.
Which clan members were planning to travel? Where they’d be vulnerable? which passwords had recently changed.
She was directing his hunt.
In March of 1870, Abigail’s child was born, a daughter named Sarah after Thomas Garrett’s dead first wife.
The birth was unremarkable, except for one detail that only Abigail understood.
The baby’s eyes were too dark, her features too ambiguous, not quite white enough to escape notice in a household obsessed with bloodline purity.
Garrett noticed.
He said nothing for the first two months, preferring to believe the child would lighten as she grew, as mixed babies sometimes did.
But when it became clear Sarah would carry permanent evidence of her uncertain parentage, Garrett’s suspicion calcified into rage.
He confronted Abigail in May in the parlor of their Montgomery house, his voice controlled but venomous.
This child is not mine.
Abigail met his eyes without flinching.
She’s yours by law.
That’s what matters.
You were pregnant before we married.
You were already carrying that creature’s bastard when your father delivered you to me like tainted goods.
She said nothing.
Silence was safer than confirmation.
Garrett’s hand twitched toward the fireplace poker, then stopped.
He was calculating she could see it.
Weighing his options.
He could kill her.
claimed she’d died in childbirth like so many women did.
He could divorce her, but that would require explaining why, would risk exposing that he’d been deceived into marrying damaged property.
Or he could keep her contained, the child, too, and salvage what he could of his reputation.
He chose containment.
Abigail and Sarah were confined to the second floor, their meals brought up, their movements restricted to the bedroom and small sitting room.
Garrett told his business associates that his wife was recovering slowly from a difficult birth.
Needed rest, privacy.
It was imprisonment disguised as convolescence.
But Garrett had miscalculated.
He thought isolation would break her.
Instead, it gave her time to plan something that had been gestating as long as the pregnancy itself, her own disappearance.
By summer of 1870, the Tuscaloosa Clan chapter had lost 11 members to death or disappearance.
The pattern was undeniable now, impossible to attribute to coincidence.
Malcolm Price called an emergency assembly in July, gathering the remaining 31 members in the temple to address what he termed a campaign of federal assassination.
His theory was that reconstruction authorities had infiltrated their organization, identified key members through captured documents, and were systematically eliminating leadership.
It was a plausible explanation that aligned with the chapter’s existing persecution narrative.
Many members accepted it without question.
But three men in the room knew better.
They’d seen the three-finger signal at death scenes, had heard whispers about a marked man moving through the countryside, had begun to suspect that the creature Malcolm had intended to torture slowly was hunting them instead.
One of those men was Thomas Garrett.
Garrett had traveled to Tuscaloosa for the emergency assembly, leaving Abigail confined in Montgomery.
During the meeting, he pulled Malcolm aside and shared his theory that Jacob had escaped Red Fern, that he was using his knowledge of clan structure to target members, that Malcolm’s attempt to mark him permanently had instead created an enemy with perfect camouflage.
Malcolm’s face went still as he processed the implications.
If Garrett was right, then Malcolm himself was the primary target, the architect of the system that had created this nightmare.
But there was a larger problem.
Garrett explained about the child, about Abigail’s pregnancy, about his suspicion that she’d been carrying Jacob’s baby when they married, which meant she’d been complicit, had lied to her father, had spent over a year maintaining a deception that made them all vulnerable.
Malcolm listened without interrupting.
When Garrett finished, Malcolm’s response was cold and immediate.
Where is Abigail now? Confined upstairs in my house under guard.
Is she writing letters? Garrett hesitated.
I don’t know.
I’ve restricted her access to supplies, but she’s resourceful.
Then we have two problems, Malcolm said.
A marked man hunting us and my daughter potentially aiding him.
Both need to be eliminated.
They developed a plan that night, coordinating with the remaining chapter leadership.
First, they would set a trap for Jacob using false information about a vulnerable target traveling alone.
Leaked through channels they suspected Abigail might be accessing.
When Jacob appeared to take the bait, they would overwhelm him with numbers, kill him, and bury his body where it would never be found.
Second, they would deal with Abigail.
Garrett proposed an accidental death, a fall down the stairs perhaps.
Tragic, but not unprecedented for women in fragile health after difficult child births.
Malcolm agreed, though he insisted on being present to ensure it was done properly.
What neither man anticipated was that Abigail had been preparing for this exact scenario for months, that her apparent compliance was strategic, that imprisonment had given her time to cultivate an ally they’d both overlooked.
The housekeeper, a freed woman named Dina, who’d worked for Garrett since emancipation, had watched Abigail with growing sympathy.
She’d seen the way Garrett treated his wife, had heard the baby crying in isolation, had noticed Abigail’s careful kindness toward the household servants, in contrast to Garrett’s casual cruelty.
When Abigail asked Dina to carry one final letter, offering her all the money she’d managed to hide over the past year, Dina accepted.
The letter went to the Methodist missionary contact in Mobile who forwarded it through the network to a Freedman community near Tuscaloosa.
From there, it reached Jacob in the form of a message delivered by a child who found him sleeping in an abandoned tobacco barn.
The message was brief.
They are setting a trap.
Do not take it.
Instead, trust me one more time.
November 9th, the temple, midnight, bring fire.
Below the words, Abigail had drawn the three-finger signal.
November 9th, 1870 began with ordinary evil.
Thomas Garrett left Montgomery early that morning, for what he told his business partners was a trip to Mobile to inspect cotton shipments.
In reality, he was riding to Tuscaloosa to finalize arrangements for his wife’s murder.
Abigail watched him leave from her upstairs window, counted to 100, then began executing the plan she’d refined over six months of confinement.
First, she dressed Sarah in layers of clothing, wrapping the one-year-old tightly to muffle any sounds.
Then, she waited until Dina brought the midday meal, at which point she collapsed dramatically, claiming difficulty breathing.
Dina ran for the doctor.
exactly as Abigail had known she would.
The other household servants, a cook and an elderly man who maintained the grounds, were occupied elsewhere.
Abigail had 5 minutes, maybe six.
She used three to climb down the trellis outside her window.
Sarah strapped to her chest in a sling she’d constructed from bed sheets.
Her feet hit the ground without sound.
She ran.
A wagon waited two streets away, driven by a freedman Dina had recruited, paid with the last of Abigail’s hidden money.
The driver asked no questions, simply snapped the reinss, and headed north toward Tuscaloosa at a pace that wouldn’t attract attention.
They reached the outskirts of the town by evening.
Abigail knew she couldn’t enter openly.
Malcolm’s house was too wellnown, his surveillance network too comprehensive.
Instead, she directed the driver to a specific location, a clearing in the pine forest half a mile from the temple, a sight she’d identified in one of her letters to Jacob.
She waited there as darkness fell.
Sarah sleeping fitfully against her chest, the November air cold enough to make her breath visible.
She had no certainty that Jacob had received her message.
No guarantee he would come.
No plan beyond this moment if he didn’t.
But at , she heard footsteps on the path.
Jacob emerged from the trees like a ghost, carrying nothing but a canvas sack and the knife he’d used to survive two years of hunting.
He stopped when he saw her, his expression cycling through disbelief, relief, and something deeper that neither of them had words for.
“You came,” Abigail whispered.
“You asked me to.” Jacob’s voice was rough from disuse from months of speaking only when necessary.
When he saw Sarah, his face changed.
“Is that yours? Ours? Her name is Sarah.” They had no time for reunion, no luxury of processing what the past two years had cost them.
Jacob explained what he’d prepared.
Cans of kerosene stolen from a railroad depot, rags soaked in lamp oil, an understanding of the temple’s structure gained from months of surveillance.
Tonight was the night Malcolm had scheduled Abigail’s death.
Garrett was supposed to return to Montgomery tomorrow with news that his wife had tragically fallen.
The remaining chapter members were gathering at the temple for a planning session about the federal threat.
Abigail’s plan was elegant in its simplicity.
She would stage her own kidnapping, leaving evidence that she’d been taken from Montgomery by federal agents or abolition extremists.
Garrett would return to find her gone.
the household in chaos.
No body to confirm death or survival.
Meanwhile, she and Jacob would destroy the temple and everyone in it.
It was murder, premeditated, calculated murder.
They both understood this.
They also understood that every man in that building had participated in systems designed to break, sell, and kill human beings.
That moral complexity wasn’t absence of guilt, but it was context.
What would you do if the law protected your tormentors and called you criminal for existing? If the only justice available required becoming the thing they claimed you already were.
They moved toward the temple at , carrying fire.
The temple sat isolated in its clearing, lamplight visible through the high windows.
the sound of voices carrying on the cold November air.
23 men were inside.
The surviving members of Malcolm Price’s chapter gathered for what they believed was a strategic meeting about survival.
Malcolm stood at the front as always, his hood pushed back, explaining his theory about federal infiltration.
Thomas Garrett sat in the second row, impatient for the meeting to conclude, so he could return to Montgomery and complete the task of eliminating his wife.
None of them noticed the smell of kerosene until it was too late.
Jacob had spent an hour before the meeting began, moving silently around the temple’s perimeter, splashing accelerant along the building’s wooden walls, soaking the foundations, paying particular attention to the exits.
The structure was old, dry, built from pine timber that would burn fast and hot.
Abigail waited in the treeine with Sarah, watching Jacob work, her heart hammering against her ribs.
When he returned to her position, he was breathing hard, his hands smelling of petroleum.
“Once we light it,” he said quietly.
“They’ll try to escape.
We’ll need to block the doors.
” “I know,” Abigail replied.
She’d brought rope from Garrett’s house.
Thick hemp line used for securing loads.
They moved to the temple’s two exits, working quickly to bar the doors from outside.
jamming logs against the frames.
Inside, Malcolm was concluding his remarks.
And so, we must assume every communication is compromised, every gathering is observed, every member is at risk until we identify and eliminate the federal agents among us.
Jacob struck the match.
The fire caught immediately, racing up the temple’s east wall with a sound like wind through wheat.
Within seconds, the entire side of the building was ablaze.
Men inside began shouting, running for the exits, colliding with each other in the sudden darkness as the lamps were knocked over.
The doors wouldn’t open.
Jacob and Abigail stood back, watching the flames climb into the night sky, listening to the screams that came from inside as men realized they were trapped.
It lasted 12 minutes.
The fire consuming the structure so completely that by the time the first settlers from neighboring farms arrived, the building was a skeleton of glowing embers.
23 men died.
The official report filed by the local sheriff who arrived near dawn attributed it to an accidental fire, perhaps a knocked over lamp with the doors jammed by panic and falling timbers.
It was a tragedy, he wrote, but not uncommon in wooden structures during winter meetings when lamps and stoves were burning.
The clan’s internal investigation was more suspicious, but they had no evidence, no witnesses, no way to prove what had actually happened.
The chapter had been effectively destroyed, its leadership eliminated, its records burned, and Abigail Price was nowhere to be found.
The morning after the fire, Thomas Garrett rode back to Montgomery to discover his wife missing and his household in upheaval.
Dina told a carefully prepared story about armed men, possibly federal agents, breaking in during the night and taking Mrs.
Garrett by force.
The other servants confirmed seeing strangers, though their descriptions were vague, contradictory.
Garrett knew immediately it was a lie, but a useful one.
He reported his wife kidnapped by reconstruction authorities, claimed they’d taken her as retaliation for his Confederate service, demanded federal marshals investigate.
The marshals came, asked questions, found nothing, and quietly noted in their reports that Garrett’s story had inconsistencies that suggested either he was lying or his servants were protecting someone.
Meanwhile, news of the temple fire spread across Alabama.
The clan’s state leadership sent investigators who determined the blaze was suspicious but couldn’t prove arson.
They had larger problems.
Federal pressure was increasing.
Night rides were becoming more dangerous and they just lost an entire chapter of experienced members.
The organization began to fracture.
Some blamed federal agents, others suspected internal betrayal.
A few whispered about the marked man, about a curse brought down by Malcolm Price’s pride, about divine judgment for crimes committed in God’s name.
The truth was simpler and more disturbing.
A woman they’d thought powerless and a man they’d marked for death had collaborated across two years of separation to systematically destroy them.
In December of 1870, Garrett received a letter.
It came through official postal channels addressed in a feminine hand he recognized immediately.
The letter was brief.
Thomas, I want you to understand something clearly.
You are alive because I chose to let you live.
You will spend the rest of your days wondering if that was mercy or whether I simply thought death was too kind.
If you search for me or my daughter, if you ever speak my name again, Jacob will come for you.
You’ve seen what he’s capable of.
Imagine what he’ll do if I ask him to.
Live quietly.
Die alone.
It’s more than you deserve.
Abigail Garrett burned the letter immediately.
He never remarried, never spoke publicly about his missing wife, and died in 1879 of what his doctor described as a stroke, but what those close to him recognized as the slow consumption of a man who’d spent 9 years looking over his shoulder.
Jacob and Abigail vanished so completely that for years afterward, people debated whether they’d ever existed or were simply ghost stories the clan told itself to explain its own failures.
The most reliable reports placed them in Philadelphia by early 1871, living under assumed names in the black community near South Street.
Jacob worked as a carpenter, Abigail as a seamstress, Sarah growing up in a household where both her parents were present and free.
But the rumors persisted.
Stories circulated through clan networks about a scarred black man who appeared at rallies in Tennessee, Mississippi, even Georgia, always asking the right questions, knowing the right passwords, identified by some members as belonging to the Brotherhood before vanishing when someone thought to check his credentials more carefully.
Were these sightings real? Or were they paranoia fed by the knowledge that a man who’d survived their worst torments was still alive somewhere, still carrying their secrets? In 1876, a clansman in Mobile received a letter written in Bible code, warning him that his name was remembered, his crimes were documented, and that justice might be delayed, but wouldn’t be forgotten.
He burned his robes that night and moved to Texas.
In 1881, a judge in Alabama who dismissed dozens of cases against clan members died under suspicious circumstances.
His body positioned with three fingers extended.
The investigation went nowhere, but other judges began accepting more prosecutions.
The pattern was clear to those who knew where to look.
Even in disappearance, even in the careful anonymity of their new lives, Jacob and Abigail were maintaining pressure, sending signals, ensuring that the men who’d built their power on terror, never forgot they were being watched.
Malcolm Price’s body was identified in the temple ruins through the ring he wore, a family sign passed down through three generations.
He was buried in the Tuscaloosa Cemetery under a headstone that praised his service to the Confederacy and his dedication to preserving southern heritage.
The marker made no mention of his daughter or the 22 men who burned alongside him.
The Price House was sold by distant cousins who’d inherited the property.
It changed hands three times before being demolished in 1897 to make room for a cotton warehouse.
No one who lived in Tuscaloosa after 1900 remembered that a clan chapter had once operated from a temple in the pines, or that a girl had been forced to watch her lover branded, or that both of them had survived to burn down the men who thought they were gods.
But stories persisted in the black communities across Alabama and Mississippi.
Older people told their grandchildren about the marked man and the wizard’s daughter, about how love had survived torture, and time had turned prey into predator.
The details changed with each telling became embellished, mythological, until it was impossible to separate fact from folklore.
What remains documented is this.
The Tuscaloosa clan chapter collapsed after the temple fire and never reformed with the same strength.
Federal reconstruction in Alabama intensified in the months afterward, possibly because key opposition leadership had been eliminated.
And somewhere in the census records of 1880, if you know where to look and what names to search for, you can find a carpenter, a seamstress, and their daughter living quietly in a northern city.
Their past erased, their survival complete.
Some say that even today in certain parts of Alabama when clan members gather in secret, they still tell the story of the false brand and the fire that came for the faithful.
A reminder that the marks they force upon others can sometimes mark them in return.
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