On April 27, 1858, a ten-year-old boy unwisely sought refuge from a sudden thunderstorm by seeking protection beneath an oak tree. Second later, the tree was struck by a lightning bolt which literally burned the clothes off his body and left him with a permanent imprint of the tree on his back. The consequences of that unlikely series of events led the father of the boy to experiment in the photographic sciences and invent a new means of developing images which differed from the then-popular daguerreotype using a collodion process to produce what the man termed an irontype. (This fictionalization of a revolutionary moment in the history of photography replicates a process which actually produced what was termed a tintype.) The boy who suffered through that horrific experience is the narrator of the story. Silas Bird, and the man who invented the new photo processing system is his father.
His father’s photographic technique proves amazingly popular and before long he has become famous. In fact, Silas’ dad becomes just a little too famous. One night Silas’ closest friend Mittenwool urgently wakens him in the middle of night with news that some mysterious riders are headed toward them. It is important to take note of one singular aspect of Mittenwool: he is a dead boy whom only Silas can see. Three pretty scary men on horseback soon enough show up carrying a fourth riderless horse with them: a big black horse with a bone-white face. The strangers deepen the mystery of the situation by initiating a tense meeting with Silas’ dad by asking him if he is a man named Mac Boat before announcing that they have come with an offer from their boss Roscoe Ollerenshaw. Roscoe is like a cross between a Wild West outlaw and a Mafia don: he makes offers that cannot be refused. Silas’ dad tells them he’s never heard of anyone named Mac Boat, that his name is Martin Bird, and that he is, in fact, refusing whatever offer Roscoe is offering through his mediators.
Before too long, Silas has lost one father to kidnappers and gained one chalk-faced pony that seems to be more than mere animal. With only his invisible dead friend and a strange-looking horse who behaves even more strangely as his companions, Silas sets out to find someone to help him in tracking down his missing dad. Together, the three unlikely companions eventually come across a man shaped like a barrel sporting a white beard and packing a silver pistol named Enoch Farmer. Enoch turns out to be just exactly—precisely—the thing that Silas needs most in the world: a federal marshal in the employ of the United States government currently hot on the case of the most notorious counterfeit ring in the region. And Mac Boat just so happens to be perhaps the single most talented counterfeiter in the world. And just like that, Silas is involved in Farrmer’s pursuit of a notorious outlaw and his gang who have abducted Martin Bird in order to put his photographic genius to work in the fine art of counterfeiting currency.
Eventually, they are joined on their mission by Sheriff Chalfont and Deputy Beautyman. It also eventually becomes clear that Mittenwool is not a unique figure in the experience of Silas. The dead boy is real, he did once exist in corporeal form for all to see, but he is now just ghost—though he hates that term—whose non-corporeal form can be experienced by the living only under very special conditions or to very special people like Silas whose special abilities to see and interact with the dead is not limited to just Mittenwool. Not by a longshot.
The gangbusters are finally successful in tracking down Roscoe Ollerenshaw and his gang. Things do not go entirely well. Roscoe is captured, Pony stomps one of his henchmen to death, and Silas loses his dad all over again, but this time for good. Roscoe is bundled up nice and tightly and placed on the onto a horse for the long journey to a courtroom and a date with justice. However, due to his being just generally a really rotten person, Deputy Beautyman arranges for his ride to take place backwards while sitting on the horse so that his view is its rear end and whatever happens to issue forth from what lies there beneath the tail. But it is not the tail that Roscoe directs his attention toward. Instead, as if in retribution for this insult, he gaze is leveled with a ferociously disquieting stare directly and constantly at Silas who rides to behind him.
The sheer lack of humanity in those eyes eventually becomes too much for the boy who suddenly can control himself no longer and breaks out in tears. And it is very shortly after this outburst of uncontrollable emotion that Silas learns a secret about his invisible companion that Mittenwool has never had reason to make known up to then. Using nothing more than a repetition of the word “Murderer!” that can only be heard by Silas and Roscoe Ollerenshaw—and only Silas can actually see the source of the voice—Mittenwool turns the cocky inhuman outlaw into a blubbering blob of horrified flesh. Mittenwool finally takes some measure of mercy on the man with the warning whispered into Roscoe’s ear that he if ever so much as approaches Silas again, he will be facing the risen spirit of every single person he ever murdered.
The succeeding six years of Silas’ life is spent under the protective guardianship of Sheriff Chalfont and his family. But remember that those six years include the four-year stretch between 1860 and 1864. And during those four years America experienced death in numbers unlike anything it had ever suffered before. The Civil War produces a seemingly never-ending series of opportunities for Silas to make contact with people desperately wanting a conduit between the afterlife and the land of the living. He eventually outgrows Mittenwool as he finally surpasses the age at which his ghostly friend died, but not before finally learning his real name: John Hills.
The April 27, 1872 edition of the Boneville Courier contains a blurb announcing that a young man who had recently come into a large inheritance from the estate of his late grandmother coincidentally happens to be the very same person who as a boy miraculously survived a lightening strike. He plans to use the proceeds from the inheritance to build an orphanage on the grounds of the estate which will henceforth be known as the John Hills School for Orphaned Children. The school’s emblem will be most unusual: a lightning bolt emblazoned across the white face of a pony.
