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we’ll put you up, then ride you back here in the morning.” After a beat he added, “They say you see colored.”
    â€œ ’Course I do,” Fraser said, his mind made up. “What’d you say her name is? Where’s she from in Maryland?”
    â€œShe’s Rachel Lemus, from right next to Washington, D.C.”
    â€œWhat name?”
    â€œRachel Lemus.”
    Maybe the name was common among the colored in Maryland. Fraser took a hard look at Speed Cook. Cook returned it. He seemed a prideful man. “All right, then,” Fraser said. “Let me get some things together.”
    Fraser took his time packing an overnight bag, then checking his medical bag. He grabbed some of the aspirin powder that just came in from Boston. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was good for, but the early reports were promising. Maybe it would help Rachel Lemus.
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    The rainy spring had left the roads soft, which made for slow going in Cook’s open wagon. The horse, a sorrel mare beyond her salad days, labored up the hills and wobbled down them. “Don’t know why they call these rolling hills,” Cook said as the mare heaved up a considerable rise. “They’re just damned hills.”
    Fraser was transfixed by Cook’s hands. They were large and powerful, but the fingers were twisted and gnarled. He’d never seen hands like that, not even on the miners. He asked about them.
    â€œYou ever try to catch a professional fast ball, curve ball, with your bare hands?” Cook held up his right hand. “Did it for nine years. Most days my hands swole up twice normal size, broke every finger on both of ’em, some two or three times. Catcher ain’t no little boy’s job, but they paid me to do it, paid me real well.”
    â€œThey give you much pain?”
    Cook shrugged. “You get used to it.”
    They talked baseball for a while. Cook sputtered about Cap Anson being a race hater, how the man drove every last colored player out of professional ball. Fraser suspected that with Speed Cook a lot of conversations came back to race.
    Cook said he was planning to start a newspaper for colored people, one that would explain that they had choices, they had to stand up for their rights, no matter what the cost. Fraser protested that there weren’t any race haters in Harrison and Jefferson counties. It used to be so, Cook admitted, or it seemed so when he was a boy. But it didn’t seem so anymore.
    â€œ ’Course, I’ve been baited by professionals,” Cook said. “Grandstands full of white people screaming at me, calling me names, threatening me, all because my skin’s darker than theirs— and not darker than all of them, neither. Hell, they even come down out of the stands after me.”
    â€œI remember reading about that fracas, the one where the man got killed.”
    Cook didn’t answer. Fraser looked up the hill on his side of the wagon. A few scrawny cattle cropped what looked like weeds.
    â€œJury said I was innocent,” Cook said. “Twelve white men on that jury, they all agreed I had the right to defend myself.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    Cook shook his head and snorted. “That’s why I carry a knife, always do. And that was in the North. Don’t even want to talk about down South.”
    Steubenville huddled on the edge of the Ohio River. Cook drove to the south side, land that was too low and too near the water. They pulled up in front of a tired two-story structure that dwarfed the shotgun shacks on either side of the street. The building expressed its ambitions through a sign that read C OOK H OTEL, plus a coat of whitewash with green trim. The wind gusted in the fading light. Rain was coming, maybe a lot of rain. As they dropped off the wagon, Fraser doubted he would sleep in his own bed.
    â€œWhen you said you could put me up,” Fraser said, nodding at the sign, “I guess