The Book He Carried

 chaplain handed him a Bible on a Virginia road in 1864 and was dead by the following afternoon. Reverend Elias Cane has been carrying both ever since. In Seattle, in the summer of the gold rush, he finally understands why.

Seattle, 1897. An outfitting company is sending men to the Klondike short on supplies. A shipping merchant who found out is dead. Reverend Elias Cane investigates the present while telling the family he's staying with the story he's never fully told — about a Civil War chaplain who gave him a Bible the day before he died, and what happened at a Virginia mill in 1865 that Cane has been carrying for thirty-three years.