The Ghost Wore Gray by Bruce Coville Page A

said. “He was too well known.”
    I felt a little silly. I also felt a little angry with Effie for making me feel so silly. I didn’t think it was such a bad question to ask. I wish people wouldn’t do that when you ask a question. It makes it hard to ask the next one. Sometimes you’d rather stay stupid than have someone laugh at you.
    I think Effie realized what she had done because she went behind the counter and got out a book. “Here,” she said, “you girls might like to look at this. It’s a biography of Samson Carter. Tells all kinds of interesting things about him; that man did more good works on an off day than two parsons and a politician generally manage in a lifetime.”
    â€œCan we sit on the porch and look at this?” asked Chris.
    â€œI suppose so,” Effie said. “As long as you promise not to run off with it.”
    When we opened the book, it looked weird. I couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that the words on the right edge of each page formed a zigzag pattern, instead of a straight line, like most books. The pages looked more like a typewritten letter than a regular book.
    We flipped to the front. According to the copyright page, the book had been written by someone who lived near Samson Carter, and published by a local company. I was used to regular books; it was strange to see something like this.
    We began to read. It was fascinating—all about the terrible things that had happened to Samson Carter when he was a young slave, and the enormous risks he had taken to escape from slavery. I found myself wondering if I would have had the courage to endure all that to seek my own freedom.
    Then it talked about his work with the Underground Railroad. I wish I had room to write about some of his adventures. There were so many disguises, chases, daring escapes, close calls—But he never lost one of his people, even though getting them out almost cost him his own life more than once—like the time he ran into a swamp to lead a pack of hunting hounds away from the rest of his group and almost got caught in quicksand.
    And then we found the map. It was in the center of the book, tucked in with about twenty pages of photographs and drawings of Samson Carter and the other people and places mentioned in the book. We might have flipped right by it, if I hadn’t noticed the words “Cap’n Gray” written at the top.
    â€œWhoa!” I yelled as Chris started to turn the page. She stopped, and we stared at it for a minute, trying to make sense of it. It looked vaguely familiar.
    â€œIs there a caption?” I asked finally. Chris turned the page. The next page had two photographs of people Samson Carter had rescued. There were three captions, one for each of the photos, and one that said, “Overleaf: map found among Samson Carter’s paper’s after his death, indicating the burial place of Captain Jonathan Gray. See story, on page 155.”
    We flipped back to the map. Sure enough, it showed the location of the little cemetery we had found near the waterfall.
    We turned to page 155. The first part of the story was the author’s version of stuff we already knew from Captain Gray’s diary. Then it got more interesting. According to the story Samson Carter told the author, Captain Gray had just started to make his will when the searchers came looking for him again. So Carter and the innkeeper had taken the captain back to the hidden room.
    It was an hour before the men left. Captain Gray’s last hour on earth, as it turned out; he was dead when the innkeeper went back to get him.
    That was sad enough. But the rest of the book was even sadder, because it told the story of Samson Carter’s death. I had just assumed that since he had survived running the Underground Railroad, he must have lived on to die a peaceful death.
    The world doesn’t work that way, I guess. It turns out that he had made many