In 1873, a remote corner of West Virginia became the setting for one of the strangest and most enduring mysteries in American mountain lore. The state itself was barely a decade old and still learning the shape of its own borders. In Marion County, high in the Allegheny Mountains, the ridgelines narrow into tight, wet folds that no one has ever surveyed twice.
The nearest town of any real size was Red Gap. The railroad ended there. The telegraph line ended there. A single road ran northwest out of town for about twenty miles before it forgot it had ever been a road at all. Somewhere along those last stretches, wedged into a fold of mountain that seemed to draw its own weather, lay a place the locals called Harrow Hollow.
A family lived there. Or something that had once been a family.
Within three years, three grown men walked the road that passes near it, and none of them came back. Three years, three men, the same twenty miles. That was enough to draw the attention of the federal circuit.
On the morning of October 3, a deputy U.S. marshal named Obadiah Vessey stepped off the train at Red Gap. He carried a saddlebag, a Winchester rifle, and a sealed envelope from the district court in Wheeling. He was forty-one that fall, tall, narrow-shouldered, broad-handed, with a face weathered by travel and eyes the color of stone before rain. He had served thirteen years as a marshal, spent four years in the war with Union forces, and before that worked farms he never spoke about. In the county, he was known as the man they sent for cases nobody wanted to write down.
This was that kind of case.
Sheriff Merritt Colby met him at the station in a badly worn black coat. Colby limped, an old wound from Antietam that he usually called his weather leg. He was fifty-eight but looked seventy. The first thing he did after shaking Vessey's hand was look past him at the train, as if hoping more men had come. There were none. Vessey had come alone. He always did.
They walked from the station to the courthouse without speaking. Red Gap in 1873 was a town of two streets, a livery stable, a bank that had failed twice, and a saloon where men drank hard cider strong enough to strip paint. There were more women than men because the war had taken the men. There were more graves in the churchyard than houses because the fever of '69 had taken the rest. It was the kind of place that measured its worth by what it had lost.
In the sheriff's office, on a plain wooden table, Colby laid out three files. He did not open them right away. He put his hand on top of them like a man holding down the lid of a pot about to boil. Then he spoke before Vessey could say a word.
"I want you to understand something before you read these," he said. "Whatever decision you make about that valley, I can't help you with it. My deputies won't ride past the second creek. My town won't sell you anything if they know you mean to go up there. And I'm fifty-eight with a leg that barely walks. I won't be any use to you past the mill. Do you understand me?"
Vessey said he understood.
Colby opened the first file. The man's name was Ezra Wakefield, a government surveyor from Charleston, sent in the spring of '71 to survey the ridge road for a county map. He was thirty-six, married. Two witnesses saw him eat breakfast at the last farm before the road began to climb. No one saw him after that. His horse came back alone eleven days later, saddle askew, one stirrup gone. His survey instrument was found six months afterward in a creek branch a mile east of the road, wrapped in an oilcloth that was not his.
"Wrapped in oilcloth," Vessey said. "That means somebody put it there."
Colby nodded once, slowly. That was exactly what it meant.
He opened the second file. The man's name was Barnaby Chesup, a traveling peddler, sixty-one years old, thin as a switch, driving a painted wagon selling needles, thread, tin cups, and patent medicines. He had worked that road twice a year for fifteen years without trouble. In the fall of '72, his wagon was found off the road at a place called the Turn, a wide bend where a man who knew the trick could turn a wagon back toward town. The horses were still hitched, calm. The lantern was still lit. Everything he owned was inside the wagon, including the day's earnings in a leather pouch under the seat. Everything except him.
"Everything except him," Vessey said.
"Yes," Colby said.
He opened the third file. The man's name was Reverend Odom Whitlash, a Methodist circuit preacher, forty-nine years old, from near Elkins. He rode the ridge road once a season to hold meetings at the few farms up there, and he always stopped at a place called the Wheel Mill to water his horse and eat a cold biscuit. Last July, his horse came back to town alone on a Sunday morning, still saddled. The saddle was on backward. Tied to the saddle horn with a piece of rope that came from no saddle shop Colby knew was a scrap of black cloth cut from the preacher's own coat. The coat only.
"Three men, three years, the same twenty miles," Vessey said.
"The same family," the sheriff said.
Vessey looked up. Colby held his gaze a long moment, then said, "You'll hear this name about ten more times before you leave here. Better it comes from me first. The family is called Harrow. They've lived in that valley since 1798, when a man named Josiah Harrow took a mineral grant from the old Northern Neck land office and never came out again. They haven't sold anything to anyone. They haven't bought anything from anyone. They haven't recorded a death, a marriage, or a claim in seventy-five years. The last time one of them was seen in town was 1849. Didn't speak to anybody. Bought powder. Bought salt. Bought lamp oil. Then walked back the way they came."
"How do you know they're still there?" Vessey asked.
"Because we're still losing men," Colby said.
That night, Vessey sat in a room above the saloon and read the three files twice. He wrote nothing down. He never did on a case like this. He had learned young that a case like this you carry in your head, because paper has a way of disappearing. He slept four hours. He dreamed of a wheel turning in slow water, and a hand on the wheel that was not in the water at all.
At dawn, he went to the livery to hire a horse and a guide. The horse was easy. The guide took the sheriff's letter, a promise of federal silver, and half a bottle of saloon whiskey before he agreed. His name was Zephaniah Crowl, and he was part of that land the way the rocks were. He was fifty-one, powerfully built, exactly six feet in his boots, with a face the color of walnut bark and hair the color of wet stone. He had lived his whole life on one of the last farms before the road gave out. He knew every gap, every hunting trace, every creek that changed its bed in heavy rain. He had been up past the mill twice, both times before he was thirty, and he had no intention of going a third.
He told Vessey this in the livery while holding his horse's neck.
"Marshal, I'll take you as far as the mill," he said. "I'll point you the way up from there. I'll show you the mark on the last tree, the one nobody but a man born here would cut with a knife. But I won't go into that valley with you. If you go, you go alone. If you come out, you come out alone. And if you don't come out, I'll ride back to town and tell them a story that won't have your name in it. Do you accept that?"
Vessey said he accepted it. Zephaniah Crowl shook his hand once, hard, and said they would leave at first light.
They rode out of Red Gap on October 4, 1873. Two men, three horses, one extra horse loaded with grain, and a small canvas tent. The first day was easy. The road climbed steadily through second-growth timber and old cornfields gone to brush, past a dozen farms where women stopped their work at the fence to watch them pass. Every one of them knew where Vessey was going. He could see it in their eyes. It was not pity. Pity is for the newly widowed. This was an older look, the one reserved for a man who has already left but is still walking.
They camped that night at a wide bend in a creek Zephaniah called the Two-Mile Short, because it sat two miles from the mill. They ate salt pork, dry bread, and coffee boiled black enough to stand a spoon in. Zephaniah did most of the talking. He told Vessey about the country the way an old preacher tells scripture, moving back and forth in time, jumping from a story about his grandfather to a story about last winter and back again without stopping for breath. He said three peoples had walked those hills before white settlers ever set foot on them, and all three had avoided the same place, the exact spot where the road bends into what is now called Harrow Hollow. He said his grandfather, who hunted that whole range and feared nothing that walked or crawled, refused to spend a night within two miles of that slope.
"And this is the part I want you to hear, Marshal," he said. "My grandfather and my father told me the Harrows weren't always the way they are now. That they were once a normal family like any settler family west of the Blue Ridge. That something in that valley worked on them over the years and turned them into what they are. I don't know if he meant something physical, or a way of living, or a hunger. But I know he wasn't a fanciful man, and he didn't repeat a thing to hear himself say it. He said it once, the way a doctor tells you the truth."
Vessey asked what he believed they were now.
Zephaniah looked into the fire for a while. Finally he said, "Marshal, I don't think they're human anymore the way we're human. I think they're what people become when nothing holds them back for four generations. I think they're what happens when the world runs out for a family, and they start eating themselves from the inside."
Vessey did not answer. He went to his bedroll and slept badly. At midnight, he heard a whippoorwill call three times and then go silent. After it went silent, from very far away, behind a hill and down inside a rock gap, he heard something answer it. It was not a bird, and it was not a man, but something in between that had bothered to learn the call and nearly got it right.
That was the first night. That was the easy night.
On the second day they reached the mill. It was a low, half-collapsed building of chestnut logs beside a creek that dropped out of the valley in a long white line of hard water. The wheel was still on it. A huge, dark oak wheel, black with age and green with moss so thick it looked like fur. It turned slowly, without hurry, and it made a sound as it turned that was not the sound of water against wood. It made a sound like a low sigh coming from under the wheel, not from the wheel itself.
Zephaniah refused to go near it. He tied his horse a hundred yards downstream, sat on a rock, and pointed with his chin. The road went up behind the mill along the near bank of the creek for about three miles. It bent left at a broken oak. From that tree, another mile remained to a clearing. In that clearing stood a house. Only one house was left in that valley now, and it belonged to them. There had once been four. All that remained of the others were three foundations and a pile of chimney stones at the far end. All the old lives had moved into that one house. That was how they lived now. All of them in one house, all of them one body.
Zephaniah remembered what his mother had told him: never go past the mill wheel. She had been dead nineteen years, and he still heard it. Every mother in that county had said it for a hundred years. He had never gone past it. And there he was, watching Vessey leave.
Vessey said nothing for a long time. He checked his rifle. He checked his sidearm. He put a piece of hard biscuit in his coat and a paper of wax matches in an inner pocket. He gave Zephaniah his last letter, the one every marshal in that district carried, folded in oilcloth with instructions and kinfolk's names and the small line at the bottom about who to notify if the body could not be recovered. He shook Zephaniah's hand and said, "Three days. If I'm not back in three days, ride to Red Gap and tell them what you saw."
Zephaniah said, "Marshal, I'll wait one day, not three. One day. Because whatever their truth is, if they take you, they'll come looking for the man who brought you, and I don't intend to be here when they do."
Vessey nodded and said that was fair.
He walked past the mill wheel. It turned once behind him as he passed, and the sound it made was not water.
The road past the mill was narrower than before. In places it was not a road at all, just a dirt trace along the creek, worn by feet that had walked the same line for a hundred years. He walked slowly. He looked for tracks. He found some. He found a bare footprint in a patch of mud, a wide, heavy print with splayed toes, like a foot that had never worn a shoe. It was not a small foot, and not a child's foot. It was an adult man's foot, broad and long, and beside it was another of the same size, and another, and another. Four sets of footprints, all headed down toward the mill, all headed back up toward the valley, and not one of them shod.
He studied those tracks for a while. He thought about how deep the mud was. He thought about how a print that deep could be left in mud that packed. He thought about weight. He thought about the weight of a barefoot man against a shod one, and how much heavier a barefoot man gets when he is carrying something. He did not like his own arithmetic. He walked on.
About a mile farther, the road passed a place that had once been a small homestead. The house was gone, but a chimney and hearthstone remained, and a half-buried millstone. A plow lay on its side, red with rust, so old the rust itself had gone gray. And there, driven into the trunk of a chestnut beside what had once been a doorway, was a piece of iron. Not a nail, not a hook, but a shaped piece of iron like an H with a very low crossbar and one leg longer than the other. The iron was polished at the top where a hand had gripped it many times. It had been driven into that tree, at that dead homestead, as a marker.
Vessey did not touch it. He knew a claim when he saw one, and he knew the difference between a claim you make on the living and a claim you make on the missing. This was the second kind.
He walked on. He passed two more of these markers at two more empty foundations. The same iron, the same shape, the same polished top from the same kind of grip. Whatever the Harrows had been in 1798, over four generations they had put their mark on every place that was no longer theirs, and they had done it slowly, one grip at a time.
He reached the broken oak at dusk. It was as tall as a church tower. Lightning had split it from crown to root thirty or forty years before, and it had healed around the wound, growing over the split so that from the road the tree now looked like a hand holding itself. On the trunk, at a height a man could reach without stretching, was a set of cuts. Not a warning, not writing, but a tally. Small vertical marks in groups of five, four upright and one across. He counted the groups. He reached a number, and it is worth pausing on that number, because this is where the story changes. He counted eleven groups of five and three extra marks alone. That meant fifty-eight marks. That meant fifty-eight somethings had been tallied on the last healthy tree before the house.
He did not know what the marks counted. He did not want to know yet.
He camped that night in a laurel thicket right beside the road. He lit no fire. He ate dry bread cold and drank from the creek, and the water tasted like iron rings on a coffin, and he watched the road. At midnight, he heard footsteps, bare feet, coming up from below. Not running, not creeping. Walking. A slow, unhurried, heavy walk, the walk of a person who had crossed that ground a thousand times and no longer needed his eyes. Vessey did not move. The steps passed within twelve feet of him. Then they stopped. He heard breathing, long, patient, unhurried, the breath of a body that had worked hard all day and was resting between rooms. He heard a sniff. He heard a long, slow sniff, twice, three times, the way a hound sniffs when it thinks it has found something. Then a voice, not close, not loud, a woman's voice from farther up the road, calling one word, a word he did not know, two syllables, not English, not Cherokee, not anything he had heard in thirteen years of federal service across five states. The walker on the road answered with the same word and kept going up the hill at the same unhurried pace.
Vessey stayed in the laurel until dawn. He did not sleep. When the light was enough to see his hand in front of his face, he stood, brushed leaves off his coat, and walked in the bare footprints left on the frost for the last mile of road toward the clearing.
The clearing was smaller than he had imagined, less than an acre, ringed by tall, dark hemlocks that had grown close together to form a wall. In the middle of the clearing stood the house. At first glance it did not look like a bad house. It was a two-story log house built of hand-hewn timbers and chinked with clay, with a stone chimney at one end and an ell at the back. Some of the windows had glass panes. It had a proper door. It had been painted at some point. There was still a ghost of white at the corners where the weather had not reached.
You had to look a moment to see what was wrong with the house. The wrongness began with the windows. There were curtains behind them, heavy curtains, brown the color of old blood, sealed tight over every pane on both floors. But at the bottom of every window was a narrow gap, about two fingers wide, where the curtain did not quite reach the sill. A curtain gap arranged on purpose, so that someone inside could sit low, on the floor perhaps, and look out without being seen. Every window was arranged that way, every one.
The wrongness went on with the door. The door had a lock, but the lock was on the outside. A large iron hasp driven into the frame from the outside with a lock the size of a fist hanging open in it. It was a barn lock, not a house lock. It was the lock of a place whose main job was keeping something in.
And the wrongness ended with the yard. The yard was clean. Not tidy, clean. There was no grass. The dirt had been swept, and swept recently, in long, precise lines by a straw broom. There were no wagon ruts. There were no chicken tracks. There were no dog tracks. There were no boot tracks. There were only bare footprints. Many of them. Overlapping. Long, broad, splayed. Exactly like the tracks on the road.
Vessey stopped at the edge of the hemlocks. He watched the house for a full hour. Nothing moved. No smoke from the chimney, though the morning was cold. No sound from inside, though the walls were thin. Once, and only once in that first hour, he thought he saw the curtain in the upper left window move. Just the bottom edge. Just enough to widen the gap and narrow it again. He waited. Nothing.
He walked into the yard. His boots made noise in the swept dirt. He was aware, as he walked, of how his boots looked in that yard, too clean, too new. Wrong. He was aware of how a marshal's coat looked at that door, in that yard, like a costume, like a man wearing a man's clothes in a place where humans were the quarry.
He knocked on the door. There was a silence longer than there should have been, and then from the other side of the door, very close, the way a person stands who has been standing there the whole time, a voice in a whisper that was almost polite said, "What do you want? Why did you come to the door?"
Vessey said, "My name is Obadiah Vessey. I'm a deputy marshal of the United States. I'm here about three men. Ezra Wakefield, Barnaby Chesup, and Odom Whitlash. Have you seen these men?"
The voice waited. Then it said, "Come in, Marshal, and we'll tell you."
He did not go in. He said, "I'd rather you came out. I'd rather we talked on your porch. I'd rather see who I'm talking to."
There was another silence. Then the voice, closer to the door now, a voice like an old woman or an old man imitating a woman, said, "We don't come out, Marshal. We haven't come out in a long time. If you want to talk, talk from inside."
The door opened. It opened by itself, all the way. No hand touched it, no face behind it. There was only the inside of the house, dim, warm, smelling of wood smoke and old grease and something sweet Vessey did not want to think about. And from somewhere deeper in a room he could not see, the voice said, "Come in, Marshal. Come in and see us."
Vessey did not go in. He did the thing every man in his trade was trained to do, and the thing every man in his trade forgets to do at least once before the end. He took one step back. He put his hand on his sidearm and said, "If you have something to tell me, tell it from the door."
From the room he could not see, another voice spoke, a man's voice this time, low and unhurried and not far away. "Marshal, there are eight of us in here. Eight grown people. If we meant to take you, it would already be done. But we haven't done it yet. We're inviting you to come in and sit and eat what we have, and we'll tell you where those three men are."
Vessey stood at the doorway of that house for what he later described to a doctor as the longest thirty seconds of his life. In those thirty seconds he did a simple piece of arithmetic in his head. He counted the marks carved on the tree. Fifty-eight. He counted the missing men recorded by the county. Three. He counted the peddlers, the surveyors, the timber cruisers, the tax men, the road travelers, the circuit preachers, the census takers, the drifters, the drovers, and everyone who had gone up that road since 1798 without a wife to raise the alarm. He got a number bigger than three. He got a number that made fifty-eight look modest. And he understood, at the doorway of that house, in that clearing among the hemlocks, that the sheriff of Marion County had called him for three cases because three was all the sheriff could write down. Not because there were only three.
He took a second step back. His boot sank into the swept dirt behind him without a sound, and without warning one of the lines drawn in the dirt moved. It stood up. It was not dirt. It was dirt covering something, and that something was standing. A grown man, naked, coated in a layer of pale clay, had been lying on the ground in the yard behind him the entire time he stood at the door. He was rising with the patience of a man who had done this before and knew he had all the time in the world.
Vessey drew his sidearm and fired one round into the ground at the man's feet and shouted, "Down, down, down."
From the house, and from all sides of the house, from the hemlocks, from above the roof, quietly and without hurry, exactly the way people rise from a table when the prayer is finished, six more stood up. Naked, clay-smeared, silent. The oldest was a woman as tall as Vessey with hair the color of ash. The youngest, if a person of thirty-eight could be called young, was a man missing three fingers on his left hand from what looked at first like an old, healed bite. None of them ran. None of them charged. They stood in a loose ring around him and the door and waited. And from the doorway, still with no visible face, the polite voice said, "Come inside, Marshal. It will be easier if you surrender yourself. It has always been easier."
Vessey did not surrender himself. He did something that saved his life. He would later say he did not decide to do it. His body did it before he thought about it. He turned and walked, not ran, toward the narrowest gap in the ring, where the swept dirt met the hemlocks, and he went through it with his sidearm level and his eyes fixed on the gray-haired woman's eyes. She did not step aside. She did not step forward. She looked at him the way you look at a plate of food you have decided to let cool a little longer. He walked past her. He entered the hemlocks. And when he was among the trees, he ran.
Behind him, he heard no footsteps. From the direction of the yard, he heard one clear, unhurried sound. He heard the house door close. That was all. In some ways it was the worst thing he heard on the whole trip, because a family that closes the door after a marshal runs understands that the marshal has not left. He has only postponed.
He ran until his lungs could not take another breath. He ran until his feet were like dough. He ran down the road back to the broken oak, past it, past the empty foundations with their iron claims. He ran until he saw, above the creek, the small gray smoke of Zephaniah Crowl's fire, twenty-four hours past the deadline he had set for leaving.
Zephaniah was on his feet with his rifle in his hands before Vessey came around the last bend. He said, "Good God, Obadiah, look at your face. Look at your face."
Vessey did not know what his face looked like. He only knew what he had seen. He said, "We're leaving now. We're leaving now, and we're not looking back, and we're not talking until we've made two miles, and we're not stopping until we reach Red Gap."
Zephaniah looked once, only once, up the road toward the mill wheel, then untied both horses, gave Vessey the lead rein of the faster horse, and they went. They did not speak until they had made the two miles. In fact, they did not speak until they reached Zephaniah's porch three days later, when Vessey was put on a rope bed with three blankets and half a bottle of good whiskey Zephaniah kept behind a stone in the hearth. Then Vessey talked. He said, "They were waiting for me in the yard under the dirt. They were waiting under the dirt."
Zephaniah said, "Good God, Obadiah. Good God."
Vessey wrote his report over three days in the sheriff's office. He wrote it in a hand that shook badly enough to smear the ink on some letters. He wrote what he had seen. He wrote what he had counted on the oak tree. He wrote his arithmetic. He wrote about the door that opened by itself, and the man who rose out of the swept dirt, and the gray-haired woman who looked at him like a meal being postponed. He gave the report to Sheriff Colby.
Colby read it once, slowly, without moving. He set it aside. He said, "Marshal, this report is not going to Wheeling the way it is."
Vessey said, "Sheriff, it will."
Colby said, "Marshal, if this report goes to Wheeling, they will send fifty men up that road, and fifty men will not solve anything. Fifty men on that road will add a bigger tally to the oak tree, and it won't stop until the last man in West Virginia is standing in that yard in his boots, being counted. That family does not lose to numbers. They have been facing numbers for seventy-five years."
Vessey said, "Sheriff, then what do you want me to do?"
Colby said the sentence worth remembering, because it decides how a story like this ends and how it does not. He said, "Marshal, I want you to write a different report. A report that says three men got lost in rough country. A report that recommends closing the road two miles before its end and building a wall there, and posting a warning on it in three languages so no one goes up who doesn't already know. That is the report I can act on. That is the report the county can pay for. That is the report that saves the next three men."
Vessey looked at him a long time. Then he wrote that report. Colby signed it. In the winter of 1873, the county built a wall of stacked stone at the two-mile short and posted a warning on it and closed the road.
The first report, the one Vessey wrote with a shaking hand, was placed in a locked drawer in the sheriff's office. It stayed there through Colby's term and his successors', and through the fire of 1902 that took half the courthouse but left the sheriff's office standing. As far as is known, it was not read again until 1951, by a Works Progress Administration historian named Marion Delf, who was not allowed to copy it but wrote enough of it in a private notebook now held in a small archive in Charleston. That notebook is how we know today what Vessey saw. And what Vessey saw is what has been told here.
Obadiah Vessey resigned his post in the spring of 1874. He did not go home. He went west and worked the rest of his life as a horse-car driver on lines in Colorado and Wyoming. His widow, who married him in 1878, said in later years that he never slept with his window covered, never sat with his back to a door, and never ate food that had been put on his plate by someone he had not watched do it. He died in Cheyenne in 1911 at the age of seventy-nine, of heart failure and old age. He never went up that road again.
Zephaniah Crowl never went up that road again either. He did not have to. His farm sat two miles below the wall, and he lived there another twenty-two years. He told the story of what he saw at the mill, what he heard at the fire, and what he read on Vessey's face when he came out of the hemlocks exactly once, to his nephew, on the night before he died.
Sheriff Merritt Colby served three more terms. He never opened the drawer holding Vessey's first report. When he retired, he handed the key to his successor without a word, and his successor did the same, and so on through four sheriffs until 1922, when the drawer was finally forced open by a curious clerk who took one look, put the papers back, and locked it again with a new key he then hid. That is why we have Marion Delf's notes and not the papers themselves.
The wall at the two-mile short still stands. It has been rebuilt twice. The last time, in 1949, the warning went up in English only and mentions nothing about a family and nothing about a valley. It says the road is unmaintained and impassable and the county assumes no liability, which is true.
As for the Harrows themselves, in 1911 a timber cruiser working the far side of the hill reported smoke rising from a clearing on the wrong side of the creek. In 1928, a pilot flying mail from Elkins to Charleston, low in heavy fog, reported seeing for one second, in a fold of mountain where his map showed no settlement, the slanted roof of a two-story log house. He reported it once in the pilots' lounge and never again, because he was laughed at. In 1946, a pair of hikers went two miles past the wall on a dare. One came out after four days. He never spoke publicly about what he saw. He gave a private statement to the state police that was sealed by court order until 2072. The other never came out at all. When a search party formed and reached the mill, they found the wheel turning. On a creek that at that time of year, in late September, in a dry year, should not have held enough water to turn a paper boat. And on the moss on the wheel near the top was a fresh clay handprint, bare, wider in the palm than any hand a doctor in the group measured on a living person.
That is the limit of what the records leave. There is no ending to this story that closes its file. The Harrow family, if they were ever a family, if they are still a family, if the thing that spoke through the door in 1873 is the same thing that left a clay print on the mill wheel in 1946, do not appear in any tax record, census, birth or death register, court record, or deed book. They appear on one page at the back of Marion Delf's notebook, in slightly shaking handwriting, at the bottom of a paragraph describing the yard and the swept lines and the door that opened by itself.
The last line of that paragraph, and the last line of the whole account, reads this way. Deputy Marshal Vessey states in conclusion that he does not believe the Harrow family, as of October 4, 1873, can properly be counted among the living, and that he is not prepared to count them among the dead. He recommends closing the road. He recommends building the wall. He recommends that the county wait and watch. And above all, do not go past the mill wheel.