“Our ma used to read us that story,” Duck said happily. “Did you ever read the first one, about Helen of Troy?”
“Naw. But me and Auntie Ruth did sing parts of the Odyssey back and forth to each other.” On this, Quinn began to sing in a lilting voice that Keech considered angelic:
“Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero
Who traveled far and wide
After he sacked the famous town of Troy.”
Quinn stopped singing and chortled. “That probably ain’t how the Greeks used to tell it. We just made up that tune for fun.”
Keech smiled. “I used to sing to my orphan brother, Sam. He liked my cowboy songs. He would tell me stories from the Bible; I’d sing him tunes about cattle drives and outlaws.”
“Mr. Strahan knows a cowboy song or two,” Quinn said.
“How’d you meet him?”
“He found us down the Kansas River, running from a mean pack of border ruffians. Auntie Ruth was sick with a bad fever. He took us on to Wisdom and nursed her back to health. Put us up in his own house for a spell. One day he moved us to our own cottage. Auntie Ruth made curtains for the windows, and Mr. Strahan would come to visit and cook us supper. ’Course, this all happened before Friendly Williams and Rose’s gang.”
Cutter said, “Those bandidos do have a bad habit of ruining a good time.”
Nat huffed. “You sure said it.”
“But the likes of them won’t stop us from reaching Bonfire Crossing,” Duck piped in.
Quinn fell silent for a moment. Finally, he said with a curious tone, “Bonfire Crossing. I’ve heard of it before.”
Keech and Nat pulled rein so quickly, their horses’ hooves skidded a few inches over the ice and snow. Keech looked at Quinn, whose face glowed a vivid amber in the torchlight. “How’d you hear of Bonfire Crossing?”
“From Mr. Strahan. I heard him talk with another man about it once. He mentioned Bonfire Crossing by name. ‘If I could take you right to it, I would,’ he told this fella. ‘But I can’t find it no more.’ Then he said something about a bent-over tree.”
“A bending tree!” Duck exclaimed.
“That’s right,” Quinn said, his face turning more curious by the second.
“We saw a strange bent tree just before we got to the mission,” Keech said. “It was standing by itself in a field with four white stones around the roots. Did you ever see it?”
“No. It was dark the day I got to the mission,” Quinn answered.
Sally’s hooves crunched through snow and ice as Nat hauled the mare a few steps closer. “Quinn, it’s important you tell us everything you can remember.”
“Well, I only overheard the talk. I didn’t even see the man Mr. Strahan was talking to. I was standing outside, and I just heard voices.”
“What else did Strahan say?” Keech asked.
“There was talk about a fang. It didn’t make sense.”
“A fang from the Chamelia?” Duck asked.
“I ain’t sure. The fella in Mr. Strahan’s house must’ve been looking for it, ’cause Mr. Strahan said, ‘If this fang is so important, I do hope you find it.’ And the other fella said, ‘I have to. It can’t fall into the wrong hands.’”
Keech mulled over the story. “It must be some kind of weapon.”
“Maybe so,” Nat said. “What do you think, sis? Did you ever hear Pa mention a fang?”
But Duck didn’t answer. She stepped off Irving and slogged her way toward a nearby thicket, a narrow stretch of dogwood that looked almost terra-cotta in the yellow torchlight.
Keech hopped off Felix. “Nat, borrow the torchlight for a sec?”
Nat handed his torch down, and Keech followed Duck to the brush. The warm glow of the flame cast long shadows over the white forest. Just ahead, Duck knelt to examine a bare dogwood limb. When Keech caught up to her, he noticed that a few of the branches had been snapped.
Cutter’s voice called to them from the horses. “What are y’all doing over there? Hunting rabbits?”
“A big animal came through here,” Duck shouted back.
Keech leaned in closer with the torch and noticed something dark on the broken offshoots. A quick sniff sang coppery in his nostrils and told him the liquid was blood. He swept Nat’s torch around the area.
“Do you think it was the Chamelia?” came Quinn’s voice, just behind them now.
“Ain’t sure,” Duck said.
After nothing obvious turned up in the torchlight, Keech stopped straining for clues and allowed the land to speak. The recent snowfall had covered the ground, but a subtle divot in the way the icy blanket lay revealed that something had been dragged through the area a short time earlier.
A few careful steps to the south brought Keech to the base of a blue ash. All four of the others had fallen in behind him, but he squeezed them out of his vision and focused on the tree. He noticed a narrow smear of blood, darker than ink and still moist but freezing quickly to the bark. Just above this smudge, a series of ragged holes punctured deep into the wood, as though a carpenter had scaled the tree some six or seven feet and driven in clumsy nail pits.
He handed Nat’s torch back to him so he could point with both hands. “I think the Chamelia dragged John Wesley’s body through here.” Keech indicated the path. “What’s mighty peculiar is, I think it pulled him up this tree.” He gestured over his head to the blood streaks. “The holes in the bark tell me the Chamelia had one hand on John, the other on the tree, clinging to it with its claws. The back feet dug in here, and here, see?” He motioned to the rough progression of holes.
“You mean that thing’s up in the limbs?” Quinn backed away.
“I doubt it,” Keech said. “These tracks are half an hour old, at least. I bet it’s long gone.”
“Why would it carry John Wesley up a tree?” Cutter asked.
“Maybe it spotted something it didn’t like and skedaddled into the branches for cover,” Duck said.
“It looks to me like this thing’s on a clear path to the river,” Keech said, then got a sudden, terrible thought. “Do we really want to be tracking it without proper weapons?”
“Least this way, we know its general where’bouts,” Duck said. “Better than losing sight of the beast and having it ambush us.”
“Good point.” Nat glanced back at the ponies. “Let’s get going. It’ll be light soon.”
They rode for another half hour through driving snow, till the purple glow of dawn kindled on the eastern horizon and pushed back some of the white haze. The young riders crested a broad hill, and before them appeared a flat, open valley blanketed with snow and ice. A large brown river cut through the midst of the valley.
“Look, Felix, there’s the Kansas,” Keech said to his pony.
Felix replied by smacking his mouth against his bits, a gesture that Keech knew meant, Let’s just get a move on already.
The Chamelia’s tracks cut sharply down the hill to the river’s edge. Keech noticed a sizable ferryboat anchored to a sturdy wooden post on the northern shoreline a few dozen yards away from the beast’s trail.
Four dark mounds lay scattered across the beach near the boat. Keech knew instantly what he was looking at.
“Dios mío,” Cutter said. “Those are bodies!”
“That’s the old Uniontown trade crossing,” Quinn said. “The ferry connects the logging road that runs past Mercy Mission to the Sherman Trading Post about a mile upriver. The traders use the ferry to barter with the Potawatomi Indians. Maybe those are the ferrymen.”
“I best go find out. Y’all wait here.” Nat clicked at Sally and started down.
When he returned a moment later, his face looked sick. Even Sally’s demeanor wasn’t at peace. “I reckon our old pal Sunrise and his men rode to the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Quinn looked stunned. “That’s the bounty hunter?”
Nat nodded. “The other three are the fellas who ransacked our camp. The Shifter must’ve got them before the
y could cross the river. When we go down, I advise everyone to look the other way. They’re torn up something awful.”
Quinn exhaled grimly. “I wish they’d been good men. I wish they led decent lives, instead of wasted them on bad deeds. Now it’s too late.”
The gang approached the white beach, giving the macabre lumps that were Sunrise Albert and his fallen hunters a wide berth. Near the river’s edge, Keech drew rein on Felix and slid off, resisting a powerful urge to glance back where the trackers lay.
After studying the area for a moment, he pointed. “The Chamelia entered the river here. Swam for the opposite shore. And notice these drag marks.” With an easy gesture, he traced two thin channels in the snow left by a pair of boots. “It pulled a body along.”
“One of the bounty hunters?” asked Duck.
Keech shook his head gloomily. “No, I’m afraid it’s John Wesley.”
Everyone looked shocked.
“You can’t know that,” said Cutter.
“There’s a clear boot print there, see?” Keech gestured to a single impression on the bank, the place where the boot in question had pressed flatly into the ground. “After traipsing all over Floodwood with y’all, I know your boot prints like the back of my hand, and that one belongs to John.”
Cutter mumbled a bleak-sounding curse. “That’s it then. Any chance John was alive is gone. If he somehow lived to this point, the river either drowned him or froze him.”
Keech felt new waves of despair crash into him. Though his sensible mind had told him that his new friend had died in the explosion, some kind of desperate hope had lingered that John Wesley was still alive. But as he gazed across the Kansas River, he finally knew that John was gone forever.
The torches had at last burned out. Tossing the useless wood to the ground, Nat suggested they all dismount and discuss their next steps.
His eyes swelling, Cutter gestured to the ferry. “We should take the boat across.”
“That is the only way over the Kansas for miles,” Quinn noted.
Where the abandoned ferry was docked nearby, heavy ice frosted the shoreline, freezing the sand so that the day-old tracks left behind there held their shape. Keech inspected the area. “I count at least three sets of boot prints and maybe five horses. It looks like the ferrymen lit off west down that trail.” He pointed out the path.
“I can’t figure why they’d leave the ferry deserted,” Quinn said. “Maybe Sunrise and his men scared them off.”
“Last night’s norther was something fierce,” Duck said. “A storm that wild likely drove them off to shelter.”
“Or maybe they caught a glimpse of the Shifter,” Nat suggested.
“Well, I don’t aim to wait for them to wander back.” Cutter bounded off Chantico and led her to the boat. “Let’s get going.”
The ferry was a curious-looking vessel; it appeared to be a giant raft with two covered horse stalls on the deck, one standing on the starboard side, the other on the port side. Keech had never seen a watercraft like it. Nailed to the ferry’s anchor post on the shore was a small wooden sign bearing a message:
UNIONTOWN CROSSING
1 Man 1 Horse 40 cents
Single person 20 cents
Horses 30 cents each
Loaded Wagon & Team $4
Empty Wagon & Team $2
Keech considered their options. “I don’t think we should just steal this ferry. Seems wrong.”
Quinn cleared his throat. “I realize y’all are used to working inside the Law, but if the ferrymen come back and get a look at me, we don’t know if they’ll help us or turn us over to hunters. If you’re gonna ride alongside me, you’ll have to get used to keeping out of sight.” On that note, he trudged Lightnin’ across the white beach and hopped on board.
“Maybe we can pay the ferrymen back after we’ve stopped Rose,” Duck said.
From the deck of the boat, Quinn added, “Wisdom ain’t far. You Lost Causes can debate your plan for the rest of the year, but not me. I’m gonna sail this river with or without y’all and go free Auntie Ruth.” He paused to glance down at the iced-over boards under his feet. “In fact, I dub this here boat the Liberator. Now, who’s with me and who’s staying?”
“I’m with you,” Cutter said. He led Chantico onto the ferry.
Keech guided Felix to the platform next. Letting out a sigh, Duck followed.
Nat looked at everyone else aboard Quinn’s Liberator, then glanced up and down the shoreline as though entertaining a second thought. For one moment, Keech thought the rancher would refuse to join them. Then Nat announced, “Okay. We’ve got a mission to accomplish. Let’s get this boat sailing.”
There was no cable or rope stretched across the river that a ferryman could pull, so at first it was a mystery how to propel the big boat across the channel. After a quick study of the ferry’s mechanisms, Keech realized that the horse stalls on each wing of the vessel were long treadmills.
He whistled in amazement. “This ferry’s run by horsepower.”
“What’s that mean?” Cutter asked.
Before Keech could explain, Nat and Duck walked their Fox Trotters toward the two stalls. Nat directed Sally into the starboard compartment, while Duck led Irving into the port side box. The horses faced opposite directions, north and south, and each pony was soon harnessed up to a sturdy iron bar inside their stalls. Nat pointed back at the hemp rope attached to the bank post. “Cutter, toss that anchor. Me and Duck will show you fellas how this contraption works.”
With the rope released, Nat and Duck nudged their ponies to walk in place on the treadmills. Two big paddle wheels on each side of the boat commenced to churn the slushy water. The ferry lurched forward on the channel, and the gang was off.
“I never saw a more ridiculous boat,” Cutter said.
Tucking his bowler hat against the cold, Keech gripped the rail as the Liberator drifted gently toward the southern bank, its curved bow driving through the ever-tumbling snow.
CHAPTER 10
ATTACK OF THE MARSH BANE
The young riders had traveled more than halfway over the Uniontown crossing when a shadow suddenly slid across the misty brown water. Keech glanced up to mark the source and saw it was a massive, malformed crow. It was too high to spark his amulet but was quickly diving.
“Lost Causes, we got company!” he said. The gang looked up and watched as the malevolent fowl circled down closer to get a better look at the Liberator.
“I’d hoped we had lost those rascals for good,” Nat said.
“Rose knows exactly where we are now,” Cutter groaned.
Keech recalled the first time he laid eyes on one of the Reverend’s emissaries: in Missouri, just before Bad Whiskey rode up to the Home to confront Pa. “Those things always follow Rose’s men. We should keep a lookout.”
Suddenly, Duck pointed to the southern shoreline.
“It’s him! It’s Big Ben!”
Sitting on the low bank atop a bay horse was a hulking man in a tan coat. The man wore a massive red beard split right up the middle and braided to tapers at each end. It resembled a diabolical, upside-down fork. A dark, flat-brimmed hat perched on the short red curls of his hair. The killer sat on his horse in the wafting snow and watched them.
Swift movement on Big Ben’s left shifted Keech’s gaze. Two more of the Reverend’s crows perched nearby on the branches of thick bushes. They rustled darkly against the backdrop of forest. One bird released a thunderous Ack!
“What do we do?” Quinn said. “We can’t just float over to him.”
Nat didn’t take his eyes off the killer. “Turn this thing around. We’ll seek cover back in the forest.”
“No, Nat, we have to take him down,” Duck insisted. “Now’s our chance.”
“I’m with Duck,” Cutter said. “We’ve got the amulets. The crows will keep their distance, and if Big Ben’s anything like El Ojo, the silver charms can drop him dead.”
Through the snowy haze, Big Ben d
ismounted and shuffled down to the river’s edge.
“He’s moving into the water,” Duck said.
Stopping to tuck the tails of his riding coat into his waistband, the brute pushed back a thick wall of reeds and waded knee-deep into the river. He held something in one hand. Not a pistol, but a small brown pouch.
Keech studied the man’s movements. “What’s he up to?”
The others gathered at the snow-dusted rail and stared across the water.
“This is reckless,” Nat said, his teeth clenched. “I want justice on Big Ben like everybody else. Probably more. But if he pulls a pistol, we’re sitting ducks. We ain’t equipped for a fight.”
Keech fumbled down the neck of his coat and drew his amulet shard. “I believe we are.”
Big Ben’s burgundy whiskers parted into a smile, but the grin contained nothing of the devilish joy that Bad Whiskey had displayed when hurting others. He reached inside his pouch and scooped out a small grayish mound onto his palm.
The desperado tossed the material across the water. Most of it fanned out over the sludge a few feet in front of him, but the cold wind swept some of it into the air and carried it farther offshore to mingle with the snowflakes drifting into the river.
Big Ben gave the young riders a two-fingered salute. He then wheeled about and returned to his horse. The bay jolted at the kick to her sides and Big Ben was gone in a flash, galloping into the shadowy forest that hemmed the southern bank. The brace of crows perched on the branches leaped into the sky and followed him, heavy black wings battering the snow.
“What just happened?” Duck asked. “Where’d he go?”
“No idea,” Keech said, “but I don’t like it none.” He kept his eyes on the places in the river where the grayish material had fallen, but he saw nothing but brown water.
“This is a trap. Turn the ferry around! That’s an order,” Nat said, but instead of waiting for someone else to fulfill his command, he hurried over to the starboard driving stall, where Sally trotted on her clacking treadmill.
The Fang of Bonfire Crossing Page 7
