Buried Treasure: A Jericho Sims Tale (The Adventures of Jericho Sims Book 2)

by T. Mike McCurley

  Jericho turned his grin back to the warriors and stumbled through a short speech. A looping fist took him in the gut and he doubled over, coughing. The warrior shouted more words.

  “I...I don’t think they trust us,” Jericho gasped.

  “They’re gonna kill us.”

  “He said something about a necklace made outta teeth.”

  “Snider took that. Had claws and fangs and such.”

  “Give them the rest of what came out of their graves,” Jericho urged. “They ain’t taken my gun yet.”

  “There’s a good twenty of them here.”

  “Which is why they don’t expect a fight. When I shoot, you run for my horse. Get the rifle from the saddle and you kill anybody that ain’t me, right?”

  “You’re crazy!” Boyd said, though his eyes flicked over to where Gideon stood.

  “Me? I didn’t rob no burial ground.”

  “Them redskins wasn’t using it.”

  “I’d shy away from saying things like that,” Jericho said with a slow shake of the head. “We gotta tell ‘em something. Where were y’all going from here?”

  “I don’t know where Snider is taking them, but probably up northeast a ways. We got a hide up near the Seminole border. You listen up, friend: you get me out of this, and I’ll take you there. You and me, we’ll split that money and leave them dry-gulching assholes in the dirt.”

  “What about the Indian stuff?”

  Boyd smiled. His tone was overly friendly, like a child to a puppy. “These blanket-ass scum don’t need it. It’ll make a good sideline for us.”

  Jericho’s hand dropped to the butt of the Colt and it snapped free of the holster in a move so fast it was a blur. The gaping barrel drove hard into Boyd’s neck as the hammer slipped back. From the circle of men around them came a shout, followed by an ululating cry of victory. Jericho’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a death’s-head grin and his head shook in a slow back and forth motion.

  “Wrong answer,” he said.

  The warriors around them surged forward a few steps, pinning the two men together even as the Indian who had struck both men laughed aloud.

  “Thank you, Jericho,” the warrior said. His English was clear, with only the slightest hint of an accent. “We will deal with this one.”

  Boyd struggled to speak, but the unyielding metal in his throat made it difficult. “You bastard. You sold me out,” he managed.

  “I ain’t gotta speak Chickasaw real good when they speak English. Y’all done robbed the wrong tribe,” Jericho said, ignoring the accusation. “My friend Akocha and his people find their grave sites raided and they take it damned personally. As for me, I don’t mind helping out a friend when it comes time to get back what was taken, even if you see it as selling you out. These folks are gonna deal with you. Meantime, I’m gonna ride outta here and track down your partners. When I find ‘em, I’m gonna see to it that they give back all they took, and I’m gonna bring back anything extra I can lay my paws on, as interest. Y’all took some important stuff from these people. Folks bury shit for a reason, and they don’t expect someone to come along and dig it up. Sorry to leave you here, but... You know what? I ain’t sorry. Grave robbing is pretty damn dark.”

  “You will come to regret what you have done here,” Akocha said, grabbing Boyd by the hair and roughly turning his face so that the man was forced to look into the dark brown eyes of his captor. “You will regret for a long time.”

  He shoved the man into the hands of the other warriors as Jericho holstered his weapon and made his way toward Gideon. Akocha followed in an easy, loping stride.

  “I am coming with you,” he said.

  Jericho looked him up and down and grinned. “Reckon that ain’t so bad,” he said. “Let’s go get your horse.”

  “You leave me here and you’re killing me!” Boyd shouted. His cry was cut off by the sound of a fist striking flesh.

  “Maybe someone will dig you up and steal that tooth,” Jericho called back.

  “Dig him up? Losa Nita will have that tooth out as soon as he sees it,” Akocha said as Jericho fisted the reins of his horse and the pair walked free of the group.

  “Boy always did have a thing for gold. That was a nice punch, by the way,” he added. He rubbed the sore spot that was left on his abdomen.

  “Wanted to make it look good.”

  “You almost made it look like my breakfast. I owe you one.”

  The pair continued along the path until they returned to the burial grounds that had been raided. A trio of warriors with rifles were on guard there, and they nodded politely at Jericho and Akocha. The Chickasaw held the beaded necklace overhead and the three warriors raised their rifles in triumph, smiling and chattering quietly amongst themselves as they resumed their watch.

  Conversation drifted back and forth between Jericho and Akocha until they arrived at the village the locals had set up not far from the banks of a small river. Akocha spoke to the village leaders and explained the situation while his wife gathered supplies for the journey that he and Jericho would undertake. The elders spoke animatedly, with much more waving of arms and hands than Jericho was accustomed to seeing in a discussion. The talk was so fast he could only make out the occasional word, but he did hear numerous references to the necklace they had been concerned about when the thefts were first discovered. He kept his silence, and remained where he could assist Akocha’s wife Nanoka with the addition of articles to the pack horse that would accompany the two men on their trek. Within the hour they were riding northeast.

  “Your folks seemed mighty worked up over this necklace,” Jericho said. Akocha nodded, his fingers tightening on the reins he held.

  “You know the legends of my people?”

  “Not really. Heard about Rabbit a little in the war.”

  “This is different. Rabbit is tricks; chaos. The Lofa is evil.”

  “The what?”

  “His name means ‘skinner’. He is a giant man who hunts the unwary and flays the skin from their bones.”

  “That sounds kinda messy.”

  The warrior shot a look at Jericho. “It is no joke,” he said. “The Lofa is free now because of these men we follow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The necklace they stole. Our shaman bound the spirit of the Lofa to that necklace. So long as it was buried beneath the ground, so too, was the Lofa. He was confined there. He could do no harm in the burial mounds. Now he is free again. Until we recover the necklace he may walk the woods and kill as he sees fit.”

  “When y’all get stuff taken, you don’t go by half, do you?” Jericho said, urging Gideon to move with just a little more haste. “What happens if we run into this Lofa thing?”

  Akocha shrugged. “He is stronger than a man, and he smells.”

  Jericho turned and gave the warrior an incredulous look. “He smells? You mean goes around sniffing stuff?”

  “No!” replied Akocha. He laughed aloud and slapped at a knee. “He has a smell to him. A stink. Some legends say he can kill you with it, or just make it so hard for you to breathe that you can no longer fight.”

  “Well that ain’t good.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Hopefully it will work in our favor. Maybe if he’s upwind when he comes for us, we’ll smell him before he gets there. Give us a chance to plug him.”

  “I do not know how much good our guns will do. This is a giant, remember?”

  “I seem to remember a story about a giant and some little shepherd with a sling.”

  “Do you have a sling?”

  “No, but I’ve got a Winchester. I figure it’s worth a try.”

  Akocha nodded and patted the butt of his own rifle. “Let us hope,” he said.

  The two men rode for the rest of the day, following the tracks their prey had left. As the sun began to set, they stopped for the night and pitched a quick camp, gathering what wood they could for a small fire and supping on the food that Nanoka had packed
for them. As the night came upon them, they took turns sleeping and watching. The fire had dwindled to little more than a gentle glow, graced with tiny dancing flames, when Akocha kicked Jericho’s feet.

  “I’m awake,” Jericho murmured, his words not carrying further than to Akocha’s ears.

  “Something is out there.”

  Jericho sat slowly up from his position, letting his blanket slither away to a pile as he regained his feet. The Winchester rifle was still grounded beside the bedroll. Instead of the rifle he held a cut-down ten-gauge shotgun. While the rifle was his preferred weapon for hard hits and distant shots, the twin barrels of the shotgun promised a devastating flurry of buckshot that would obliterate a foe at close range. With limited vision due to the darkness, Jericho figured his chances of a long-range shot were slim to none.

  From the darkened treeline came a low grunting sound, drawn out and rising in pitch at the end. A moment later the sound of a body moving through the brush could be heard. It made no attempt at stealth.

  “Getting closer,” Akocha said. His Smith and Wesson was out and cocked, and his left hand rested on the hilt of a long knife.

  “Can’t see shit,” Jericho muttered. He pulled the flask of whiskey from within his vest, jerked free the cork with his teeth and then spit it aside. “Here goes nothing.”

  He took a deep drink of the liquor, holding it in his mouth for a moment before spraying it from his lips almost as a mist aimed at the heart of their fire. Flames climbed into the sky, the flare of light illuminating something that lurked no more than twenty yards away. It was a mountainous mass of fur, easily eight feet in height, and it was stopping its forward momentum in response to the bright eruption of light.

  Akocha’s pistol barked first, and then the night was split asunder by a brilliant flash and thunderous roar as Jericho triggered the shotgun. A scream of shock sounded from the dark form.

  “Light the place up!” Jericho shouted, ears ringing from the concussion. He snapped open the breech of the shotgun, ejecting two spent shells and digging for the replacements in his pocket.

  Akocha squeezed off two more rounds from the revolver as he took a step back toward the fire. Where the whiskey had flared bright, there was now merely the red glow of coals. Holstering the hot pistol, he threw piles of small twigs and kindling onto the fire and then dropped to his knees to blow on the coals. Small flames ignited and failed several times before one held for a few seconds. Above it, the ragged remains of a leaf caught fire and ignited the shredded piece of bark that took up space further up. Slowly it began to build.

  Jericho tried desperately to see what was beyond the campsite, but his eyes could make out no details. He knew that they had hit the monster at least once.

  “We gotta keep that fire going,” Jericho said. Akocha blew a little more into the heart of the fire and the twigs began to catch. Jericho reached back into the vest pocket and shoved his flask of whiskey back at Akocha. The warrior poured the alcohol onto the fire, letting the blue flames climb again.

  As Akocha worked to build up the fire, Jericho used the momentary glare to examine their surroundings. He was not surprised when he could see no body. He looked around for any movement that might give away the whereabouts of his prey.

  “It has left,” Akocha said as he piled sticks atop the fire. He tipped another measure of whiskey onto the wood to keep the heat up, casting flickering shadows on the boles of distant trees.

  “We hit it,” Jericho said. “I didn’t figure on it being enough, what with that critter being all legendary and stuff, but it did squeal. Worth a shot.”

  “We have angered it. It will return.”

  “Then we keep the fire up and bright. Next time we see that thing, we put it underground for good.”

  “We do not have the necklace,” Akocha said.

  “Kinda talking about something a little less legend and a little more lead.”

  They spent the next few minutes gathering more wood from the surroundings and placing it near the fire in order to keep it burning. Once they had enough, Jericho volunteered to stand watch. Akocha curled up, wrapping a blanket around himself and drifting off in a matter of minutes.

  Jericho paced the perimeter of the camp, smoking a cigarro and seeing mythical terror in every shadow of a stump and bush that surrounded their site. His brain attempted to interpret the sight he had seen earlier as he looked out across the darkened land, with little success. The logical part of him kept telling him it had to be a bear or some kind of animal, and he kept replaying the image and telling himself that it made no sense.

  “It ain’t no monster,” he whispered into the night.

  The rock hit him with steam hammer force. Thrown from somewhere in the dark, it struck with enough energy to knock the gunslinger down into a seated position on the ground. He rolled to his left to get away from the fire he came so close to falling into, feeling the pain of the impact in his upper left torso. He wondered idly if something there was broken, but knew that it wouldn’t much matter if he couldn’t keep another of those rocks from taking him in the head.

  He shouted a warning to Akocha and scrambled across the ground to recover the shotgun that he had dropped when the stone hit him. Another rock landed in front of him, skipping off the ground and carrying on into the night beyond the camp. A third hit the center of the fire, scattering sparking bits of wood in glittering arcs.

  Akocha threw off his blanket in a swirl of colored fabric and leaped to his feet, the gleaming frame of his revolver climbing as he struggled to see where the rocks were coming from.

  “Watch yourself!” Jericho warned, the speech causing his chest to ache. He knew that whatever else tomorrow might bring, a huge bruise was most definitely in his future.

  “It throws stones?” Akocha asked. He leaped suddenly to the right as another rock entered the camp and passed where he had been. His Smith and Wesson barked twice as he tried to repay the attack.

  “Yep. They sting a mite, too,” Jericho said. He lifted the scattergun to his shoulder and squeezed the twin triggers as he settled the bore on something large and dark that was moving. At this point he didn’t care if it was the Lofa or the frock-coated bandit Snider. After that rock had hammered him, it could as easily have been a giant squirrel and Jericho would have been fine discharging the weapon.

  His eyes stung from the blast and his ears were ringing like mad, but Jericho was not giving up. Letting the shotgun fall to the ground, he swept out his Colt and put a trio of slugs directly into the heart of the black mass. To his left, Akocha was emptying his own revolver as well. Their target shuddered with the multiple impacts and then fell backward to lay still.

  “Reload that pistol,” Jericho said, never taking his eyes from the dark form. When Akocha had finished, he pointed to the body. “Watch that thing. If it gets up, you put it down.”

  With practiced hands, Jericho reloaded his Colt and slipped the warm iron back into the holster at his hip. He picked up the ten gauge and blew dust off it, then snapped it open and reloaded it as well. He had begun with four additional shells in his vest, and these were the last. There were a dozen more in his saddlebags, but that would mean walking away from the fight at hand, and he had no intention of doing that. As Akocha kept watch, Jericho grabbed a length of wood from the fire pile. He tore a sleeve from his shirt and wrapped it around one end of the wood, then used the last of the whiskey from his flask to pour on the fabric. He tucked the empty flask back into his vest pocket and dipped the makeshift torch into the fire. As it blazed, he held it overhead and started walking.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got,” he said. Akocha nodded and walked beside him. The Chickasaw reached out and took the torch.

  “You have the shotgun,” he said, nodding toward the double-barrel. “Best with two hands.”

  “Good point,” Jericho agreed. He hefted the shotgun, clicking both hammers all the way back with a practiced thumb.

  They advanced on the dark shape with a slow
, measured tread, both of them wary of what could happen if the creature rose yet again. The only sounds audible were their breaths and the sizzling sound of the torch. A few inches at a time, the illumination spilled across the downed creature. With each step, the thought that it might leap up crowded the minds of the two men, and the tension grew. That tension was not the only thing increasing. The closer they got, the stronger the smell became. It was like a thick musk, mixed with the odors of rotting vegetation and feces. It was easy to tell where the legends of the Lofa’s stench came from.

  The creature was covered in thick tangles of hair, Jericho noted. It was not fur, but rather long, heavy strands of hair that piled atop one another to produce a furry aspect. The feet were long and wide, with callouses and jagged, chipped nails that extended from the toes. Jericho looked at the toes and swallowed. They looked almost human in shape, though the largest one was more than half the size of Jericho’s palm. The calves and thighs were solid columns of muscle. A bullet had blown a chunk from the left thigh, and blood flowed smoothly from the femoral artery. Jericho pointed at it and Akocha nodded. The fact that it was not actively spurting was a good sign for them. Beginning at the groin, the effects were a little more dramatic. Dozens of holes peppered the body and the torso was a matted mass of blood. Dark eyes stared sightlessly into the night sky. Kneeling beside the enormous head, Jericho stuck the barrel of the ten-gauge into the furred ear and poked a finger directly into the pupil of the left eye. When the body did not react, he let out a sigh of relief and stood.

  “Well that’s that.”

  “It is dead?”

  “That, or just really, really sleepy.”

  With a chuckle, Akocha turned and started back toward the campsite, holstering his revolver as he walked. Jericho went with him, glancing over his shoulder a couple of times out of habit.

  “Our gunfire may have attracted attention,” Akocha said. “The Snider man and his companions.”

  “We’ll swim that creek if we get there. For now, let’s just be glad your Lofa was a smoother bringdown than I was figuring it to be.”