The Eagle's Quill

by Sarah L. Thomson

  Sam could spot the tattoo on her upper arm, the pyramid with an open eye above it and a key inside. He knew it was the secret sign of the Founders, and it marked Evangeline as what she was—a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin.

  Charley Hodge shook Evangeline’s hand once and then stopped. His eyes went to her arm, then to her face.

  She nodded.

  Theo shrugged off his jacket too and rolled up his sleeve. On the inside of his forearm was his own tattoo—another pyramid, this one with a sword inside.

  “I feel kind of underdressed,” Sam whispered to Marty, who elbowed him in the ribs.

  Mr. Hodge swallowed and looked quickly around, as if checking to make sure they were safe. He lowered his voice to a whisper—despite the fact that there probably wasn’t another person within miles of here. “You’re Founders? Both of you?” Eyes wide, he looked over at Sam and Marty. “And them?”

  “Mr. Solomon and Ms. Wright are our associates.” Evangeline was putting on her jacket again and buttoning it up. “Can we speak inside, Mr. Hodge? We have a matter of some urgency to discuss.”

  Charley Hodge was shaking his head. “I never thought. I never really thought I’d be the one—yes, of course! Inside! Please! Ms. Temple, kids, come on in.”

  He led them up the steps of the front porch and into Caractacus Ranch.

  Sam had thought a ranch would involve something sort of western—furniture hacked out of logs maybe, Navajo blankets, deer heads on the walls. Instead, he felt as if he were walking into the White House. Charley Hodge led them into a many-sided foyer with an intricately inlaid floor, and then into a living room where bookshelves stood along creamy white walls, a crimson rug lay on the floor, and a fire crackled in a fireplace. “Anita! Abby!” Hodge was calling. “Come quickly! There are people here you have to meet!”

  Anita turned out to be Mrs. Hodge—as tall as her husband, with neat silver-blond hair tucked into a bun, corduroy pants, and a plaid shirt buttoned to her throat. Abby ran into the room right after Anita, and she looked to be about Sam and Marty’s age, with her mom’s blond hair and her dad’s excited grin. She looked around, bouncing a little on her sneakered feet, eager to hear her dad’s news.

  After Anita and Abby had both stared, wide-eyed, at Evangeline’s and Theo’s tattoos (Theo looked embarrassed, Evangeline cool and smiling), they settled down on couches and chairs. Abby and Sam grabbed pillows in front of the fire.

  “The responsibility has been passed down for generations,” Charley Hodge said, still shaking his head as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “My father told me that one day someone with tattoos like yours might show up, and I’d have to do everything I could to help them recover the Quill.”

  “The Quill?” Evangeline asked quickly.

  “That’s what my family has been guarding all these years. The Eagle’s Quill. The one Thomas Jefferson used to write the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.”

  “Told you!” Marty mouthed at Sam, with a self-satisfied smirk on her face. Sam rolled his eyes. As he did so, he caught Abby’s gaze on him. A quick smile spread across her face, and he couldn’t help smiling back. Then Abby wiped the grin away and turned back to her father, straight-faced. Sam felt himself starting to like this girl. It might be nice to have somebody around who didn’t take everything as seriously as Marty, or Theo either.

  “Ah. Indeed.” Evangeline leaned back in her chair, looking relieved. “That is what we have come to find, Mr. Hodge. The Quill. Where is it?”

  “Don’t you know?” Mr. Hodge looked surprised.

  “We do not.” Evangeline’s face grew even more serious than usual, and her dark eyes focused sharply on Charley Hodge’s face. “There has been . . . some trouble, Mr. Hodge. I do not want to go into details. But we must recover the Eagle’s Quill as quickly as possible, and we need your help. Please tell us where it is.”

  Blinking, Charley Hodge spread his hands out, palms up. “I—I don’t have any idea,” he said.

  Evangeline’s shoulders dropped ever so slightly. Theo’s face didn’t change, but Marty sighed, and Sam groaned to himself. Of course it wouldn’t be easy. Nothing to do with the Founders was ever easy.

  Charley Hodge explained that, about two hundred years ago, his ancestor, Josiah Hodge, had been part of the Corps of Discovery, led by Lewis and Clark. It was the first formal attempt by the new American government to explore this part of the country. Josiah had not only been an explorer, however. He had a secret mission—to safeguard Thomas Jefferson’s Quill.

  Hodge’s family had kept the Quill safely in their home for many years. “But around the Civil War something happened—I don’t know what, and my dad didn’t know either,” Charley Hodge said. “But two Founders came, saying they were descendants of Jefferson. They took the Quill and hid it somewhere else, somewhere safe. My family wasn’t told where. All we were told is to help anyone who came looking. Anyone with the right tattoos, that is. Like you.”

  “James Randolph would know where to look,” Evangeline said, tapping her fingers on the arm of her chair in frustration. “But he is . . . unavailable.”

  “Climbing Mount Everest,” Sam said.

  “Perhaps not literally, Mr. Solomon. But, yes, in Nepal. So we shall . . .” Evangeline let her sentence trail off.

  “What?” Abby asked, looking up from her seat by the fire. She had a thin, eager face with a scattering of freckles across milky skin, and she looked ready to jump up and start hunting for the Quill right then and there. “What’s your plan?”

  “We don’t exactly . . .” Evangeline trailed off again.

  “A plan makes this hunt sound a lot more organized than it’s been so far,” Sam said. “But now we know what we’re looking for, right? That’s something.”

  “Absolutely right.” Evangeline sat up straighter. “And we have friends and allies that we did not have two hours ago.”

  “Of course you do.” Anita Hodge spoke up for the first time. “Ms. Temple—”

  “Please, call me Evangeline.”

  “Evangeline, then. We can tell something is wrong.” Anita’s voice and her eyes were warm and reassuring. “You don’t need to tell us what—we won’t ask. But we’ll help you all we can.” She stood up. “And right now, I think the best way to help is to get you dinner, and beds to sleep in, so we can all start to figure out this problem with fresh minds in the morning.”

  “Ms. Hodge—Anita.” Evangeline smiled up at her. “You are perfectly correct.”

  “Then I will get some food cooking. Charley, you finish feeding the horses. And Abby, show our guests to their rooms.”

  Sam and Theo got a room together, with thick patchwork quilts on the bunk beds and posters of the wildlife in Glacier National Park—wolves, grizzly bears, mountain lions. Marty got her own room across the hall, and Abby showed Evangeline to a bigger guest room on the other side of the house, with its own bathroom and shower. Evangeline wanted to rest before dinner, so Abby turned to the three others.

  “Come on! I’ll show you around the ranch,” she said. Her eyes met Sam’s, and she smiled. “There’s some cool old stuff. I bet you’d like to see it.”

  Theo trailed silently behind, Marty asked a million questions about Thomas Jefferson, and Sam tried to pay attention. “The house was designed to look something like Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, right, Abby?” Marty said, following closely on Abby’s heels.

  “Sure, I guess,” Abby said. “My dad knows more than I do about the history of this place. But the hallway out front is supposed to be the same—”

  “As the front entrance in Monticello!” Marty interrupted. “I could tell. It’s an octagon, and it’s got the inlaid wooden floor and the clock over the door.”

  “Sure!” Abby said, her voice bright and cheerful. “Just the same!” Sam recognized that voice. It was the one he used when he was trying to convince a teacher that of course he’d done his homework.

  “Jefferson designed that clock hi
mself, you know,” Marty went on. “And he—”

  “I’ll show you the musket Josiah Hodge carried on the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” Abby broke in. “Dad keeps it in the dining room.” She had figured out Marty in no time at all, Sam thought, impressed. She knew the only way to get a word in edgewise was to interrupt, since Marty never stopped for a breath.

  Abby led them through the kitchen, where the smell of hamburgers sizzling in a skillet made Sam’s mouth water, and into the dining room. There was a big table of smooth, dark wood in the center of the room, surrounded by eight chairs.

  On one wall, over another fireplace, was an ancient-looking gun. To Sam, it looked like something from a play—could it really have fired bullets? It was hard to imagine.

  Beside the musket, in a heavy gold frame, was an old map, its parchment protected by thick glass. “That shows where the Lewis and Clark Expedition went,” Abby told them. “You can see how close they came to where we are.”

  “What’s this thing?” Sam asked, as Marty darted off to examine the map up close.

  “Um . . .” Abby frowned at the contraption Sam had noticed. It stood on a long, narrow sideboard below the musket. “I forget its name. My dad will know. It’s some kind of—”

  “A polygraph!” Marty exclaimed, rushing back to their side. Theo came to look too.

  “Huh? A Revolutionary War lie detector?” Sam asked. “What did they do, wire somebody up to this and tickle them with the quill if they told a lie?”

  Abby giggled. Marty sighed. “Not a lie detector, Sam!” she said, like a disappointed teacher.

  “I think he was joking, Marty,” Abby told her. She kept her mouth straight, but she shot a quick glance at Sam, and her eyes were bright with amusement.

  Marty’s gaze went quickly from Abby to Sam and then back to the machine on the table. Above a flat wooden platform a quill pen was poised, held in an intricate system of wires and levers, as though it were about to start writing all by itself. An inkpot of thick, carved glass stood nearby—Sam guessed you were supposed to dip the quill in that. A tall, elegant silver candlestick had been placed on each side.

  Theo moved away, as if he’d lost interest, and went across the room to stand with his hands in his pockets, staring out of a window that showed a view of stables and corrals and all the buildings of a working ranch.

  “It’s a copying machine,” Marty explained. If she’d been at all bothered by the fact that Abby got Sam’s joke while she didn’t, the joy of history seemed to have washed it from her mind. “See, you put a sheet of paper—or parchment, I guess—on the platform. Then you write with one quill, and the other quill follows the movements precisely, creating a second copy.”

  “What other quill?” Sam asked.

  “Well, there should be another quill. There. See how there’s a holder?” Marty pointed. “But it’s empty.”

  Anita’s voice drifted in from the room next door. “Dinner in two minutes! Abby, go tell your father. The rest of you kids, why don’t you come in here and help me get the table set?”

  “Thomas Jefferson used a polygraph every day,” Marty said as they gathered up plates and napkins in the kitchen and took them to the dining room. “To make copies of all his letters and documents. He thought it was a great scientific advancement.”

  “A Revolutionary War Xerox machine, huh? A lie detector would have been cooler,” Sam said, folding napkins.

  Along with the hamburgers, dinner was corn on the cob, coleslaw, baked beans, and heaping bowls of ice cream for dessert. Charley Hodge told them stories about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Marty chimed in often to add details. Abby, sitting next to Sam, turned to whisper to him. “I’ve heard all of these before,” she told him. “The next one is going to be about the moose that trampled a canoe.”

  Sure enough, the next thing Charley said was, “And one evening, just as everybody was settling in for the night, a moose came tearing out of the woods, straight for the river where the canoes were moored. And then—”

  Sam had to cover his mouth with one arm to smother his laughter. Theo, meanwhile, ate three hamburgers in silence, chewing mechanically, as if he hardly noticed the food. Evangeline, listening attentively to Charley’s stories, glanced at Theo from time to time, worry in her eyes. Then she would turn back to Charley and ask another question that would start a whole new story.

  After dinner was over and the dishes were washed, Sam found to his surprise that he couldn’t stop yawning. Anita Hodge noticed, and before Sam could figure out what had happened, she’d sent all four of the kids off to bed.

  Sam lay on the top bunk, warm under his quilt. His stomach was stuffed, his thoughts slow and sleepy, his body starting to relax. Not even the gaze of the ferocious predators on the walls could bother him.

  This wasn’t going to be so bad, Sam thought. Not anywhere near as difficult and dangerous as finding Ben Franklin’s key had been. In Death Valley, he and Marty and Theo had been all alone, thrown into the crazy puzzles and deadly traps of Ben Franklin’s vault before they even knew what they were doing. This time was different. They had Evangeline and the Hodges to help them, a place to stay, and it looked like Gideon Arnold hadn’t managed to follow them from Death Valley. Because if he had, surely they’d have seen some sign of him by now.

  So, for the moment at least, they were safe. Sam sighed and closed his eyes.

  The next day they’d have to start figuring out where the Eagle’s Quill was hidden and what kind of traps might be guarding it. All that would be a puzzle—just what Sam was good at.

  Puzzles were for the morning, though. Right now, all Sam had to do was rest. He listened to Theo turn over once, twice, and then a third time in the bunk below. And he felt himself slide peacefully into sleep.

  At least, until the explosions began.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It sounded as if a bulldozer had slammed into a wall of the bedroom.

  Sam threw himself off the bunk, half climbed and half slid down the ladder, stepped on Theo, and rolled to the floor. “What’s going on?” he asked, staggering to his feet.

  “We’ve got to get out,” Theo said, not bothering to answer Sam’s question. Sam stuffed his feet into his sneakers as Theo headed for the door. The room was almost pitch black—it must still be the middle of the night. Just before he reached it, it swung open. Marty was on the other side, visible in the dim light from the hallway. Her glasses were askew, her hair rumpled, and her eyes wide.

  “We’ve got to get to Evangeline,” Theo said, pushing past Marty into the hallway. “Follow me, you two.” Sam got out of the room just as a door opposite theirs burst open to reveal Abby in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, her fair hair tumbled loose around her shoulders.

  “What’s that noise?” she asked, voice trembling.

  “We don’t know,” Sam told her.

  “We’ve got to get somewhere safe!” Abby looked around wildly. The explosions seemed to have stopped, for the moment. Sam’s ears rang with the silence.

  “We will. Don’t worry,” Sam told her.

  Then he heard footsteps. Running footsteps.

  “Or maybe worry,” Sam whispered, jerking his head up as two men came around the corner of the hallway.

  They didn’t look friendly. They had thick black jackets, backpacks that were heavy with gear, and grim expressions on their faces. “It’s the kids! Grab them!” the one in back yelled. He seemed to fill up the hallway, and on his face Sam glimpsed a scar that ran from eyebrow to jaw.

  Sam recognized him at once. He was one of Flintlock’s men, the one named Jed, who had helped to corner Sam, Theo, and Marty in a cavern under Death Valley.

  Theo stepped forward, pushing Marty behind him. “Come on!” Sam yelped. “Run!”

  But instead of running, Theo turned sideways to the oncoming men and thrust one arm out. The guy in front couldn’t stop in time. He pretty much ran into Theo’s fist, and he fell to the ground with a groan, clutching at his nose.
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br />   But that left Jed, and he was pulling a gun out of a holster inside his jacket.

  “Theo! Watch out!” Marty shouted.

  To Sam’s shock, it was Abby who stepped forward this time. One leg bent, the knee drawing up. Her leg snapped forward and her foot connected with Jed’s wrist just as his gun was coming forward to point at Theo’s head.

  To Sam’s astonishment, he heard bone crack. Jed yelled. Abby kicked again, this time hitting his knee, and he fell.

  “Now run!” Abby said. “Follow me!”

  The four of them turned and took off down the hallway, Abby in the lead.

  Abby led them through the kitchen and into the dining room, where she skidded to a stop. Sam nearly ran into her, and Marty plowed into Sam.

  Another man in black, a walkie-talkie in his hand, turned away from examining the map of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He smiled. “In here,” he said into his walkie-talkie before clipping it back onto his belt. “All right now,” he told the kids. “No need to make a fuss. Just come with me.”

  Abby backed away from him, pushing Sam and Marty back too, so they bumped into Theo. “Let’s go,” the man said calmly, taking a step forward.

  Sam was pretty sure he did not want to go anywhere with this guy. Without pausing to think, he grabbed one of the silver candlesticks that stood next to the polygraph and hurled it at the man’s head. The guy ducked. With vague memories of backyard football games stirring in his head, Sam dove for his knees. They both went down, and the back of the man’s head bounced off the wall with a heavy, solid thud. He hit the ground and lay still.

  “Hey!” Sam beamed, scrambling up. “You see that? Somebody notify the Football Hall of Fame!”

  “This way!” Abby said, ignoring Sam. She headed for a door across the room, one Sam had not noticed before. But before she reached it, two more men in black jackets burst in from the kitchen. One was Jed, holding his gun in his left hand and limping a bit. The other had a seriously bloody nose. Both looked as if they had payback on their minds.