It was the dry, dusty, faintly sweet smell of something that had been sealed in darkness for nearly half a century, and it carried the particular and unmistakable weight of the human dead. It was, Edgar Frip would later say in an interview that was never published, a smell a man could recognize, even if he had never smelled it before, because some part of the human mind knew it the way the body knew hunger or thirst. Solomon Pinkney, who had smelled it before in the hospitals of the war years, took two steps back from the opening and sat down on a fallen log. His face had gone gray.
Edgar Frip ordered the crew to stop. He sent the youngest worker, Caleb, running on foot two miles through the pinewoods to the nearest telephone at the general store in Green Pond with instructions to call the Beaufort County Sheriff and the county coroner. Then Edgar Frip, Solomon Pinkney, and the three remaining men sat down on the ground 20 feet from the cabin and waited. No one spoke.
Solomon Pinkney, according to an account given later to a reporter from the Charleston News and Courier, took off his hat, held it in both hands, and did not put it back on for the rest of the afternoon. Jessup, who was a Methodist, prayed quietly under his breath. Edgar Frip, who was not a religious man, smoked three cigarettes in succession and stared at the broken wall of the cabin as if trying to memorize it. A squirrel ran down the trunk of the nearest pine, saw the men and scrambled back up without making a sound.
The sheriff, whose name was Oscar Hayward, arrived at Ravenel Bluff just after 2:30 in the afternoon, accompanied by the county coroner, a physician named Dr. Rutherford Stewart, who had officially retired from the coroner's office two years before, but still served on the most serious cases because there was no one else in the county with his experience. Dr. Stewart was 68 years old. He was a thin, white-haired man with a clipped manner of speaking and pale eyes that did not miss much. He had been a Confederate army surgeon at Fredericksburg, Chickamauga, and through the long terrible winter of the siege of Petersburg.
He had seen more death than most men could imagine. He approached the broken wall of the cabin with a handkerchief pressed to his nose and mouth, went inside with a kerosene lantern, and came out 11 minutes later with an expression on his face that the sheriff would describe in his written report as the look of a man who had just been shown something he had hoped never to see. He walked a short distance from the cabin, leaned against the trunk of a live oak, and stood there for a full two minutes without speaking. When he turned back, his voice was steady, but his hands were not.
What Dr. Stewart found inside that cabin, and what he would document in the county coroner's report of October 30, 1908, was this. The cabin was a single room approximately 12 feet by 14 feet with a packed earth floor, a small hearth at one end, and a narrow loft accessed by a wooden ladder. The interior had been stripped of all furniture except for a single iron bed frame standing against the far wall. On the bed frame arranged with a care that struck Dr. Stewart as the most disturbing element of the entire scene were the remains of two human beings.
One was an adult female determined by the dimensions of the pelvis and the development of the skull to have been approximately 18 to 25 years of age at the time of death. The other was a child male between 7 and 9 years of age. The sealed, dry conditions had preserved the remains far more completely than would normally have been expected after 45 years. Their clothing was still identifiable, though faded and brittle.
The woman's arms were positioned around the child whose head rested against her shoulder. They had been placed that way after death. Dr. Stewart was certain of this because the arrangement of the limbs was too composed to have occurred during any struggle. Someone, he noted in his report, had taken the time to lay them together in something that approximated a posture of rest and had then built a wall around them and gone home.
Both showed fatal blunt-force injuries to the head, with little evidence of a prolonged struggle. Whatever had been done to them had been done quickly. This was, Dr. Stewart wrote, a mercy of a kind, although the word mercy was not one he used without discomfort in this context. On a small wooden table beside the bed, there was a folded piece of paper, brittle with age, but still legible.
It was a notarized bill of manumission dated January the 15th, 1863, signed by Augustine Ravenel, granting freedom to Dillia, approximately 32 years of age, and her son Isaac, eight years of age. The document bore the seal of a Charleston notary, a man named Francis Gadston, who had died in 1879, but whose records had been preserved in the Charleston County archives, and whose signature matched the signature on the document exactly. Beside the paper, there was a small leather pouch containing 37 silver coins, mostly Mexican and Spanish pieces of eight dated between 1821 and 1859, roughly a year's wages for a free laborer in 1863. It was enough to begin a life, if you were willing to work and if you were careful.
Beside the pouch, there was a single object wrapped in muslin cloth. When Dr. Stewart unwrapped it, he found a child's wooden horse carved by hand from what looked like live oak, smoothed by years of a small palm closing around it. The mane had been carved in fine detail.
The tail had been notched with the care of a man who had loved the making of small things. Scratched into the underside of the horse was the name Isaac Ravenel. Dr. Stewart came out of the cabin, sat down on the earth beside Solomon Pinkney and did not speak for a long time. The two old men, the white doctor and the black freedman, sat side by side on the ground in the October sunlight without looking at each other.