Read The Hollow Tree for Free Online

see, was Gideon’s body hanging from the Liberty Tree.
    “If only I had said I wouldn’t take the letter to Polly Grantham,” she moaned over and over, rocking back and forth in an agony of grief and guilt. “I knew it wasn’t safe. He said that himself,‘It’ll be my death if I am found.’ Oh, Gideon!” She put her head down on her knees and wept again.
    Much later, and only gradually, she began to hear the sounds of the world around her: the soft chirping of finches and chickadees, the gentle washing of the river against the shore, the insistent chattering of a squirrel, the cawing of crows. She lifted her head and saw that the sun was well up in the sky. There was a stiff breeze, making the tender, supple willow branches sway and wafting the odour of fish from the river. Phoebe realized that she was cold. She tucked her feet under her and wiped the tears on her face with her sleeve. She looked up at the big red squirrel sitting on a low branch of the tree. His tail was twitching and he was scolding angrily.
    “Hello, Constant.” Phoebe sighed. “Why are you scolding me? There’s naught in your house to fret about — not anymore. Look, I’ll show you.” She thrust her hand into the hollow. Her fingers touched something that was not Constant’s stash of nuts. Surprised, she pulled it out. It was a tiny silk packet — small enough to fit into a walnut shell, she thought. She reached her hand into the hollow again and felt around. There was another scrap of paper. On it was a note written in lead pencil. “If I am discovered, get this message to the Mohawk Elias Brant, in Hanover.” It was signed with the letter G.
    Phoebe turned the packet over and over in her hands. “Small enough to fit inside a walnut shell,” she said aloud — or, the thought came swiftly and unbidden, inside the queue of a man’s hair. And there was the memory of Gideon the day he had marched proudly off to join a Loyalist regiment. The sun had been as bright as this day’s sun, shining on his brown hair, braided and tied with a plain black ribbon. Yesterday she had paid no heed to his hair, but that queue was clear in her mind now, and how the tell-tale packet she held in her suddenly sweaty hand could have fitted into it.
    She realized then what she should have realized the day before (only the day before?). Gideon had been dressed in deerskin leggings and shirt, and not in uniform. “He was a spy,” she whispered. “He was. Oh, Gideon, why did you have to come here?” But she knew the answer to that, too. Whatever his errand may have been, wherever he’d been going, he hadn’t been able to keep himself from slipping through the woods to see Polly Grantham.
    Phoebe looked down at the packet through the tears that would start up again. Almost without thinking, she pulled at the thread that held it together until it came loose. With trembling fingers she opened it. There were two sheets of onion-skin paper. On the top one was a message. It was addressed to Brigadier-GeneralWatson Powell at Fort Ticonderoga, in New York. Phoebe could not understand another word. She looked at it blankly. Then she looked at the second sheet of paper. There were perfectly plain English words on it: “Please offer protection to the three New York families living south of Skenesborough, near Wood Creek, the families of Loyalist soldiers Jethro Colliver, Septimus Anderson, and Charles Morrissay.” It was signed with an initial Phoebe couldn’t decipher. She stared at first the one page, then the other, in a kind of trance. She read the second page again. She studied the first page. Then it came to her.
    “It’s in code,” she said. She looked around her furtively, fearing she might have been overheard. Quickly she refolded the papers into the tiny square they had been in and squeezed them into their bag.
    What am I to do with this, she asked herself. First she thought she would tear it into bits and throw it into the river, because she