Epilogue

THE FIRST SECTION:
The wagon slowly pulled up to the farm house and rolled to a stop. A middle aged woman who had clearly eaten too many pies in her lifetime waddled out of the stone-fenced courtyard and met the wagon at the front gate. A man slowly got off the top and walked over to the woman and handed her a piece of paper.

“He’s yours now,” the man said. Another two men jumped off the top of the wagon and unlocked the rear door.

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“Come on boy,” one of them said, “this is your stop.”

But the boy refused to move. He remained huddled in his mother’s strong arm, well behind his father’s imposing chest. Again, the man called for the boy to come forward, but the boy refused to move.

“Look’s like we’ll have to get in there and get him,” one of the men said. “I’ll go in if you stay out here. Just make sure no one gets away.”

The man jumped into the wagon and lunged for the boy. The mother started crying and pulled him back even further. The father grabbed a hold of the man and tried to wrestle him down, but one of the men on the inside snuck in behind the father and clubbed him until he did not move any more.

“Father,” the boy shouted as he tried to rush for the limp man. But his mother held him tight and pulled him back into her arms. The man who tried to pry him away the first time lunged back at the mother and boy and managed to get his arms wrapped around the boy’s legs. He pushed the mother backward and he pulled the boy’s legs toward the exit. A struggle ensued until the man with the club grabbed a hold of the boys feet and pulled him straight out of the wagon while the other man held the mother down. The man holding the mother than hit her so that she would stop crying and struggling. It did not help that much, but it was enough to allow him, his partner and the boy to get out of the cell unscathed.

“You’ve got yourself a criminal here madam,” the man with the paper said. “You’d better keep an eye on this one or else you might end up dead.”

“Will do then,” the woman responded. She ordered a young man of about eighteen years old to grab onto the boy and lead him inside the gate. The boy struggled for a few moments, but the young man’s strength was too great to resist. Not long after he was brought inside the courtyard, he heard the wagon roll away and his mother shouting his name, “Willie, Will, William!”

Willie did not feel like saying much so he remained silent until the sounds of the carriage had long eluded his ears. “It will do you no good to treat me badly,” he warned his new owners. “I’ll just make it worse for you as you go along.”

The young man shoved Willie into an old barn behind the main house. He pointed toward the rear of the barn where there was an empty bed of hay that he could sleep on. The young man then closed the door behind him and locked it from the outside. William stood frozen near the front door staring at the twenty pairs of eyes staring back at him.