Legends of the Lost Causes

by Brad McLelland

  His arm cradled, he started up the embankment. The climb was perilous, a slope of loose mud that offered few footholds, just the occasional tree whose roots threatened to trip him and send him tumbling back down. By the time he reached the stone outcropping, he was smeared in muck and his arm felt like it was covered in biting ants.

  Huddling under the rock wall’s overhang, he pulled off his coat and examined the wound. The lead ball had sheared away a good amount of hide, drawing enough blood to soak his elbow, but thankfully the ball hadn’t touched muscle or bone. Tearing a piece of cloth from his shirttail, Keech wrapped the wound and tied off the bandage with a reef knot. Then he tugged his coat back on, rested against the rock, and closed his eyes.

  Floodwood’s eerie droning engulfed his tired ears and mind. He shrugged it off as best he could, and suddenly wished for Little Eugena’s bugle. Just one more time. Keech was sorry he had ever found it terrible. He would have given anything to hear its delightful noise again.

  He was asleep in less than a minute.

  * * *

  When he awoke, the woods had slipped toward dusk. The rain was still pouring and ropes of lightning charged across the sky.

  He sat upright and silently cursed. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep at a vulnerable location. He had been foolish and lowered his guard.

  Time to move.

  Stepping out from the rock, Keech looked for signs of the dead men. When he turned his gaze to the outcropping, he noticed something. A dark smudge on the stone just above where he’d been resting.

  Keech leaned in close to the smudge. It was no mere blemish. Scrawled on the stone was a series of numbers. The digits were black as if drawn in charcoal, but when he ran his hand over them, he discovered it was black paint, so old it chipped when touched.

  The numbers read:

  40 7:7

  Astonishment raced over Keech’s mind. These numbers had been drawn by Pa Abner’s hand! But that wasn’t the only revelation. He now understood why the red outcropping had been so familiar.

  It was the mountain from Pa’s portrait. The one in the study, painted over the old page of the Daily Missouri Republican.

  Keech looked at the numbers on the rock again and realized he was seeing another Bible verse, just like the ones in Pa’s telegram.

  The number 40 was Matthew. Pa’s letter to Noah Embry had included Matthew 24:42, the secret warning that Bad Whiskey was on the prowl.

  But what did 7:7 say?

  Cold shimmered upon his chest. Keech was so focused on the numbers, he barely noticed.

  Behind him, a slimy voice crooned, “Look, it’s our chickabiddy!”

  Keech wheeled around. As he did, a flash of lightning lit up the entire woodland. Scurvy and Bull stood ten feet away. Bull was wearing Keech’s bowler hat, and both of them were aiming their revolvers at him.

  Keech didn’t let himself think—he acted.

  Using one leg to launch himself off the rock wall, he sprang straight for the smaller of the creatures. He crashed into Scurvy’s midsection and they went tumbling down the embankment. Flimsy brush cracked beneath their weight. Keech bowled over a flat stone, the impact driving out his breath. Above them, Bull roared.

  For a dead man, Scurvy’s grip was astounding. The second Keech had tackled him, Scurvy had thrown his arms around Keech’s waist and squeezed. As they plummeted together down the slope, Keech thought he would split open under the strength of those skeletal arms.

  “Yer mine,” Scurvy hissed.

  “I don’t think so,” Keech said. To force the thrall to release him, he did the only thing he knew to do: he head-butted the creature. A white-hot spike of pain shot through his forehead and he heard a crack. The thrall’s arms loosened.

  They stopped rolling at the foot of the embankment and Keech shoved himself away.

  “You cracked my noggin!” Scurvy yelled, throwing a hand over a jagged dent in his skull.

  Keech tackled him again, this time throwing fists. The skinny thrall screamed as Keech’s coat parted and Pa’s pendant spilled out of his shirt. It dangled by its cord, brightly shimmering. Without fully meaning to, Keech dipped his body and dropped the silver so it rested against Scurvy’s cheek.

  The squeal that poured from the fiend was too much to bear, but Keech didn’t have to endure it for long. As the pendant radiated its violent cold, black veins pulsed and bubbled along Scurvy’s flesh. He shuddered, flopped once like a fish, then went limp. The charm had returned him back to the dead.

  “That’s for Sheriff Turner!” Keech shouted.

  But it wasn’t time yet to celebrate. Bull was on his way. The brute was stampeding down the slope with breakneck momentum. “Yer mine, runt!”

  Midway down the hill, Bull squeezed the trigger of his revolver, but the gun clicked empty. The thrall bellowed in fury and tossed away the gun.

  There would be no wrestling or punching this opponent. There would be no holding him down and touching him with the pendant. Bull was too powerful.

  Keech had to run. Only this time, he wouldn’t be running to escape. The time for fleeing like a rabbit was over. Pa Abner had taught him a hundred ways to overcome an enemy. It was time to put those lessons to work.

  It was time to be the Wolf.

  CHAPTER 17

  A BREAD-CRUMB TRAIL

  Instinct told Keech backtracking wouldn’t be the best plan. Bull had already covered the ground to the south, and might have grown familiar with shortcuts, so he decided to hold to his northern course. The expanse of a forest is your friend, Pa Abner used to tell him and Sam, when teaching them ways to engage enemies in a woodland. Win yourself distance, win time to think. He needed to keep moving at all costs.

  The problem was, Keech began to suspect that Pa’s pendant, his only weapon, was acting as a beacon, guiding the thrall to him.

  Eventually Keech came to a sharp rise and noticed a frosted willow tree tilting sideways toward the ground. He stopped in his tracks, the rain battering his uncovered head.

  “What in blazes?” he muttered.

  He approached the willow cautiously. The tree was identical to the one he’d come across before. The dull-gray leaves, the silvery prickles that moved as if alive—all the same.

  He was standing at the very same tree.

  Keech rubbed his eyes in disbelief. “That’s impossible.”

  A coincidence, was all it was. Floodwood probably grew a thousand willow trees just like it. Or perhaps the nagging pressure in the forest air was making his thoughts go all skew-whiff.

  Slathering his face with cold rainwater, he started back on his northern trek. He just had to keep traveling, gain enough distance to get the drop on his quarry.

  Bull’s furious voice echoed in the distance, “Gonna find ya, runt!”

  Keech stepped up his pace.

  Ten minutes later that peculiar pressure bore down upon his brain again as he approached a steep, familiar-looking rise. Once again he came to a halt on his path.

  He was staring at the silver willow tree, leaning out from its hill.

  “No! That can’t be.”

  Keech advanced toward the willow, as if walking up to his own gallows. He gave the tree a long study, then slumped where he stood.

  There was no doubt in his mind now. Somehow, his path through Floodwood had bent him back to where he had started.

  One Sunday morning before their day’s training—a freezing Christmas Eve—Pa Abner had sat Keech and Sam down at the place they were camping, and had gone over all the elemental rules they had covered since the first day of their forest lessons as children. When survival’s at stake, the mind can deceive, Pa had told them. Accept what is real. Recognize the lies. Cast them aside, boys. Never let them in.

  Keech struggled to devise a way to cast the deceptions of Floodwood aside. The logical answer was that he’d backtracked by accident. His tumble down the embankment with Scurvy had scrambled his sense of direction.

  But that wasn’t possible. The r
ock formation with “40 7:7” painted on the wall had been angled north—the direction he’d chosen to run. After leaving the willow the second time, he had continued that northern track, not veering in the slightest.

  Keech plopped to the ground in exhaustion and heard a jangle inside his inner coat pocket. In the distance, Bull bellowed a litany of curses. Keech wouldn’t be able to linger, but he was so lost he could no longer recognize north from south.

  Recognize the lies. Cast them aside.

  Keech peeked into his coat pocket to see what had jangled.

  Inside was the leather purse holding thirty-one pennies—the last thing Pa Abner had ever given him. Thirty-one pennies to send the telegram and buy licorice wheels for the orphans. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten about them.

  Keech stood and brushed wet leaves off his rump. He had a plan.

  He could use the pennies. He could place a penny every hundred yards, like a trail of bread crumbs. They’d be tricky to spot in the dark, but if his path led him back again to where he started, at least he would be sure of his location.

  Keech dropped the first piece of copper at the knotted base of the troublesome willow. He started moving again.

  Lightning cascaded across the sky, lighting up the woods and revealing scores of twisted black roots and gnarled boughs. Somewhere behind him, Keech heard Bull howl, “You got nowhere to hide!”

  Sprinting over the rutted earth, Keech dropped another penny at the foot of a tall, V-shaped mulberry tree. He stopped to examine the black berries on the tree, but found them wriggling with tiny yellow worms.

  He scattered three more pennies over the next three hundred yards, and then one more at the base of a tall white mushroom—a poisonous monstrosity Pa Abner used to call a Destroying Angel. According to Pa, many a frontiersman had perished because they’d mistaken the Destroying Angel for a tasty morsel.

  Perhaps that was the curse infecting Floodwood. Everything was poison. You ran in circles till north became south, then at the end of your tether, the woods killed you with its venom. The trees, the roots, the mushrooms—

  “And the water,” Keech muttered, as he walked into a grimy thicket.

  Nearby, the sound of shattering tree limbs told him Bull was looming closer.

  Keech was forming a new plan, a way to stop the massive thrall once and for all, when he passed through a narrow opening in the undergrowth. He walked another few steps, feeling that strange unnerving pressure in his head again, and realized he had just moved through a dense line of black locust trees, not a thicket at all. Before him now lay the muddy quicksand beach of the black pond.

  The very place he had wanted to find.

  He stopped at the beach’s rim and examined his surroundings.

  His plan would require close contact, and just the right amount of force. The black locust trees were in good position for his plan. The tree canopies were thick on all sides, so if Bull happened to glance over from the trail he’d been following, he would only see limbs and branches. He wouldn’t see the pond till he was right upon it.

  Now for the lure.

  Keech set a penny on the forest floor, at the spot where the ground turned to quagmire. Then he climbed up a nearby tree and perched on a thick limb. A bright memory came of Patrick, scuttling up the stairway balusters of the Home for Lost Causes and balancing on the handrail. I’m a monkey!

  Keech smiled, feeling curiously buoyant. I hope you can see me now, flapjack, he thought.

  Moments later the thrall approached the clearing. Keech could hear branches scratch across the fabric of Bull’s coat. The creature stopped to listen. Every sound seemed to freeze in Floodwood, save the unremitting buzz in Keech’s ears.

  “I know yer close, runt. I can feel ya.”

  A branch cracked as Bull lurched another step. His gold nose ring sparkled in the storm’s lightning, and Keech felt outrage when he saw that the monster was still wearing his bowler hat.

  “You think I won’t find ya. But I will,” Bull murmured, rummaging through the brush.

  Keech’s penny shimmered at the edge of the sand. Surely the thrall would notice.

  “You must be important, runt. The Master wants you somethin’ fierce. Show yerself an’ I’ll take ya to him alive. No need to die just yet.”

  A blinding shaft of lightning crashed into a tree not ten feet from Keech’s perch. Branches shattered and wood exploded across the grove. The flash momentarily blinded him. Shadows swarmed his vision and he swiped at his eyes. When he looked in the direction where Bull had been standing, he saw the dead man’s silhouette at the mouth of the clearing. The large thrall shambled toward the quicksand, rubbing madly at his own eyes.

  Keech prayed he would spot the penny.

  The thrall stopped just shy of the sand. He was directly under Keech’s limb, so close Keech could smell rotting flesh. Pa Abner’s pendant burned cold upon his chest.

  The creature removed his hands from his eyes. “The shard betrays ya, runt. It calls to me.”

  Keech held his breath. One more step.

  “What’s this?” Bull lumbered forward and bent down to inspect the penny.

  Grasping the branch with both hands, Keech dropped, swung down in a wide arc, and slammed his feet full force into Bull’s backside. The impact felt like driving into a stone wall, but his momentum was enough. The thrall careened face-first into the quicksand. Keech landed safely on the ground at the sand’s edge.

  The beach wasted no time in engulfing the heavy thrall. There was a snarl as the quicksand swallowed the creature whole, gulping down his stomach, then his legs; and now a Bull-sized lump of muddy sand slipped off toward the black pond. The gray beach sucked its prey deep into the poison water. The black liquid churned and gurgled.

  One last great bubble rose from the center of the pond and belched a disgusting spray of black liquid. Keech leaped backward. As he did, his heel kicked his hat. It had fallen off Bull’s head. He snatched it up and brushed dirt off the brim.

  “Granny gave me this hat,” he grumbled at the pond, and crammed it back on his head.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE RED MOUNTAIN

  Keech tried to mark how many hours had passed as he stumbled through an unrelenting labyrinth of trees, hills, and gulches, but the task was impossible. At least the rain clouds had parted, revealing a deep purple sky full of silver stars to help guide his way. Exhaustion weighed upon his body. He needed to hole up in a safe camp and sleep a few more hours till daylight. A campfire would be ideal, but any flame or column of smoke could expose him. Somewhere in Floodwood, Bad Whiskey Nelson was stalking about. He could almost feel the outlaw’s prowling eye, searching for him.

  Keech stopped walking and assessed his location. He now found himself in the center of a ring of evergreens, trees that put off a sulfur-like smell and bent inward, as if bowing to one another.

  This place would have to do.

  Working as fast as his wounded arm would allow, Keech tore down three armloads of thick evergreen branches. He sat for a spell and interwove their twigs into a crude blanket. The needles were scratchy against his hands and cheeks, but for the most part the boughs made a passable cover. He put his back against one of the tree trunks, gauged his line of sight from each direction, and then drew the stinky evergreen covering up to his neck. If Bad Whiskey or his thralls happened to walk near, they should only see a haphazard pile of branches, smothered in darkness. The outlaw’s monsters would sense the pendant, of course, but then again Keech would feel the shard’s coldness, so he should have time to react.

  He rested in the still of the night and tried to ignore the sulfury stench and his own discomfort. In time he lifted his eyes to the night sky. He gazed up in wonder as Floodwood’s heavenly bodies appeared to drift at once backward and forward, creating both a turmoil and a beauty in the cursed firmament. A forlorn wind circled through the evergreen canopy above him, sounding like whispers full of meaningless words. Zhahhhh, the wind spoke, a peaceful sere
nade. Before long, the tree whispers began to shape themselves in his ears, become something Keech had heard during lessons in Pa’s study.

  Zha Sape, the wind said.

  No longer meaningless, but a language, beloved to him. The Osage tongue.

  A tha no ko. Listen. Shto be. See.

  Listen and see, the tree whispers told him.

  Keech raised one finger and pretended to touch the moving stars. Perhaps it was there, among those brilliant lights, that the souls of fallen braves encountered their next home, the hunting land where they found their spirits reunited with the lost warriors of old. The idea reminded Keech of his brothers. Tears formed in his eyes—and through that fog of tears he thought he saw the Floodwood stars begin to form images. Turning, rolling, murmuring constellations that seemed to be enacting some kind of grand story.

  Shto be, the wind murmured. See.

  Keech sat upright, mesmerized, and wiped his eyes. The silver images in the sky were still there, still moving. Dancing, almost.

  “What in blazes?”

  In the stars he thought he saw his own Pa Abner, lifting what appeared to be a bear cub from the dark of a lonely den. Other sparkling characters gathered around Pa, and they whispered to the tiny cub. Before Keech’s eyes, the cub began to grow. It became the shape of a giant bear, a monstrous form, something that should not be.

  Keech blinked over and over, thinking, None of this is real. I’m asleep and Floodwood is giving me strange dreams. But all he could see was the starry image of Pa Abner and his companions, whispering to the stolen cub, creating the great bear.

  Wasape, the group whispered.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping the peculiar images would disappear. And when he opened them again, there was only Floodwood forest and he was still beneath his evergreen blanket. Clouds had once again folded over the purple sky, dropping a curtain over the night’s impossible tale. Nothing stirred in the heavens but the gloomy haze. And the wind no longer murmured to him.

  Keech tried to go back to sleep, if he had ever slept at all, and realized he was no longer sleepy. He decided to move again. He shoved the makeshift covering off his body and stood, noticing as he did a muted predawn glow behind the clouds. As the light deepened, a gray drizzle began to fall. Sighing in misery, Keech inspected the bandage around his arm. The cloth was already in tatters, so he ripped another strip from his shirt and secured a fresh dressing.