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not from abstraction or gallantry. He was anxious personally
.
I wondered for whom.
    “Post me,” I requested. “Mrs. Adams told us that her sister and son have been kidnapped for more than two hours. As reported by her cook, Meg, who was forcibly tied and left within the house.”
    “Meg went home just now, shaken up and with a stiff leg but otherwise fine,” Julius answered. “Seems that two men, one with a Colt pistol, barged into the house after she answered a knock at the door. Tied her down and tossed her in the pantry. She heard one or two screams, then nothing.”
    “Can she identify the assailants?”
    “Oh, we know who they were well enough.”
    “I mean, could she peg them in court as kidnappers of New York citizens?”
    If I’d stood up and blown a shrill whistle blast, the others couldn’t have looked more dumbfounded. The expression melted into anguish on Mrs. Adams’s face, rancid disgust—quickly mastered—on Mr. Higgins’s, and simple disbelief on Julius Carpenter’s.
    “Your friend the copper star is a real prize, Julius,” George Higgins drawled.
    “How would he know, after all?” Julius leaned forward with his fingertips touching. “Timothy, how well Meg saw them doesn’t matter. Black testimony isn’t admissible at fugitive slave trials. Only a white can officially identify a black in court. As for a black identifying a white kidnapper—I’ve never even heard it tried.”
    My jaw dropped for long enough to say, “But that’s ludicrous.”
    “Yes, that’s rather the point, isn’t it?” Mr. Higgins asked acidly. “Mr. Wilde, we’re grown men and not afraid of facing down these vermin, nor fearful of a fight if it comes to that. But we want this rescue to come to some good, you see. We don’t need your help doing what’s right. We’ve done that before, a score of times. We need your help doing what’s legal, now there are copper stars.”
    A score of times
.
    “You’ve rescued upward of twenty people?” I asked, startled.
    “We’ve begun to, though not all were saved in the end,” Reverend Brown confessed. “Sometimes we succeeded, but as for the rest . . . their court cases fell through. The poor souls are in Georgia or Alabama by now, may God grant them strength.”
    I passed my fingers through the arch of my hairline, skimming normal skin and skin resembling badly cured alligator hide. This assembly was clearly better than capable of minding their own affairs. If the fact they’d no legal way of doing so made me ill, it must have sent a brushfire burn through their guts when they looked at a pint-sized white star police.
    Six raps spaced into pairs reverberated from the foyer, and Mr. Higgins pushed to his feet with a worried glare.
    “It’s my colleague, but let me be sure,” I said.
    When I threw the door open, it was indeed Piest, half-frostbitten and his squashed face red as a boiled lobster. He stamped his boots and followed me into the parlor without a word wasted.
    “This is Jakob Piest, as good a copper star as you’ll find,” I said, making the necessary introductions. “Now. Obviously, I’m at sea here. Who’s responsible, and what have you done in the past to counter them?”
    Reverend Brown put his elbow on the arm of the settee, a finger tensed before his lips. “Their names are Seixas Varker and Long Luke. Slave catchers, they would tell you. We would say otherwise.”
    “They’re snakes,” Mr. Higgins snapped. “And we’re wasting valuable time.”
    Mrs. Adams shuddered.
    “Well, whatever their species, their names are Seixas Varker and Long Luke Coles, and I believe they hail from Mississippi,” Julius put in smoothly.
    “Where would they have taken their captives?” Mr. Piest leaned with one shoulder against the doorway. “And what can we do about it?”
    “We’ve one great cause for hope tonight.”
    “What’s that?” I asked.
    “The storm,” Mrs. Adams whispered, touching the curtain.
    Beyond the pane, snow poured