The autumn sun broke through the coastal mist in cold, pale shafts. It cast long, sharp shadows across the great stone toll-arch that had spanned the King’s Highway at Mile Nine for thirty years.
The structure was an imposing monument to town extortion. Standing twenty-five feet tall and twelve feet deep, it had been built of dressed gray freestone and dense river dark rock, anchored on massive stonework abutments flanked by iron-barred toll-booths. Across its curving stone upper wall, deeply carved in Roman capitals and inlaid with tarnished gilt leaf, was the motto of the defunct Merchant Trade ring: All Who Pass Shall Pay.
For a generation, those four words had meant penury for every common carrier between Bellwether and the sea. If a carter couldn’t produce two silver coins for his team and an extra copper for every hundredweight of turnips or salt pork, the heavy drop-gate gates of case-hardened iron dropped across the roadway. That forced his wagon into the muddy ditch to rot.
This morning, the ditch was dry. The roadway belonged to sixty men armed with pry-bars, cold chisels, heavy ash handspikes, and sixteen-pound sledges.
Two pairs of massive red draught oxen, their broad shoulders braced against oiled leather breast-collars, stood waiting patiently by the roadside. Their breath rose like steam in the chill air. Beside them stood old Elam Vance. He held a coil of four-inch manila hauling thick ship rope that had been dipped in pine pitch to resist the marsh damp.
