TOSSED

Chapter 42 – 1779 The hiding places were complete, twelve of them, stretching from four miles east of Clayville, to two miles west, roughly following the line of the Turnpike. Some of them were so cleverly disguised, that Nathaniel himself needed directions to spot them. The only thing that distinguished each was a faint etching of a small double s - (§) on the stone face. Nathaniel waited impatiently for Sam to show up. When he finally did, Nathaniel was so excited that he made Betsy wait the supper while he dragged Sam out back and explained the plan. “This way, couriers, whether they be official, or members of the peddlers’ army, or even citizen volunteers like me, don’t even have to meet, the hiding places are all known to them, they can safely go to them because they are all hidden from the road, they have the cipher code to help direct them to which hole to go to, and within the assigned hole is a Tillinghast box waiting for the next part of its journey.” “Brilliant, young gentleman, you have outdone yourself. Though I wouldn’t be calling these boxes Tillinghast boxes, it might draw attention. Let’s call them peddlers’ boxes.” “And you can expand the idea, all across New England, if there’s something we have plenty of, it’s stone walls,” added Nathaniel triumphantly. “You know, Nathaniel, you have used all the gifts God gave you, your ability to create, your ingenuity, your willingness to take risks, your cleverness with tools, God’s work has been done through you.” The older man grinned. The new network available to colonial spies and couriers swiftly spread, but creating the hiding places was only work a skilled stone worker could do, and it had to be done quietly. Still, they managed to get stonemasons from as far away as Bangor and New York to come to learn from Elijah. His reputation as a stone mason was such that it raised few eyebrows for some civilian stone masons to travel to a small town to learn from an expert. They only learned about creating the hidey-holes. They knew it had to do with working for the colonial army, but they did not know how. The peddlers operated independently of the official channels, and of one another; the less they knew about each other, the safer for all of them. You might still know your fellow peddlers, but not which peddler was carrying a packet, maybe your packet, on. You still didn’t know what was in the packet, you only had a vague sense that you carried information helpful to the war effort. You knew its route from one point in the chain to another, but likely not its origin or its destination. And if you were curious to look, you did not know how to open the boxes without breaking them, at which point. It was like of two-factor authentication in the 18th C. The writers of the documents and the recipients were not sure how the documents were getting through, but they were coming faster, and they were accurate. Nathaniel knew well enough to keep silent about the whole operation, which had far outstripped the mere delivery, under armed guard but in broad daylight, of official courier packets. The only people who had the whole story were his brother, his wife, and Sam. And none of them was talking.