Legends of the Lost Causes

by Brad McLelland

  He began to travel. The morning’s light turned the clouded sky a slate color, pledging more misery for the new day. Pushing dull fatigue out of his bones, Keech waded through a narrow thicket of sumac. As he emerged from the brush, he felt Floodwood’s throbbing heaviness surge in his head and saw in the distance, for the second time since entering the wood, the red mountain where Pa had painted his clue.

  Motion at the top of the embankment made him drop to one knee in the brush. Three dark figures shambled around the rock. It was hard to see details, but Keech thought he recognized the leather coat one of them wore.

  Keeping to the shadows, he moved closer.

  The figure in leather was Rance, the thrall who had helped Bull shoot up the Home’s front door. He was investigating the place where Keech had tackled Scurvy. So far the thralls seemed oblivious to the painted numbers above their heads.

  “A body!”

  The voice took Keech by surprise. It had come from the base of the hill.

  John Wesley.

  “One of the dead outlaws,” someone else said. This time it was Duck.

  “Something caved his head in,” came another voice. Cutter’s.

  The young riders were near, and had found Scurvy’s corpse.

  Keech wanted to shout with relief. But Rance and his companions were glancing down the embankment. They must have heard the young riders’ voices, too. Breaking from the trees, Keech sprinted toward the gang.

  Throwing a glance up the hill, he saw the dead men draw their revolvers. The trio started down the slope. The fresh mud hindered their progress, but the rotting outlaws moved with purpose.

  “Run!” Keech shouted to the kids. “They’re coming!” He gritted his teeth and picked up his speed.

  Midway down the embankment, Rance bellowed, “Lay ’em low, boys!” The hill erupted with gunfire.

  Surprised by the ambush, the young riders dived for cover. A lead ball whizzed over John Wesley’s head and knocked his straw hat off. He squealed, grabbed the hat, and scrambled on his hands and knees in search of concealment.

  From his cover behind a low rock, Nat drew a Colt revolver from a holster buckled to his hip. He aimed the revolver at a fat tree standing askew on the embankment. He fired twice at one of the tree’s thorny limbs. The rotten wood splintered and crashed down on top of the two creatures accompanying Rance. They tumbled to the ground.

  Rance yelped a curse and sidestepped the fallen limb. His revolver thundered. When it clicked empty, he slid to a stop and began reloading.

  Keech at last reached the young riders. “Come with me!” If he could make them follow, Floodwood’s twisted pathways might hide them. He cut a western path away from the embankment, waving them frantically along as he went.

  The young riders chased after him, and soon Nat caught up. “Where are we going?”

  “No time to explain!”

  Hot lead rumbled around them.

  The young riders rushed into a dark thicket. With each step the pressure in Keech’s ears intensified again. Colorful dots sparkled his vision, and the murmuring of the forest air grew louder.

  “I think he’s catching up!” Duck cried.

  “Trust me,” Keech called back. “Keep moving.”

  They stomped through a stand of high brush. On the other side, Keech found himself looking at a silver willow tree standing sideways on a hill. He slid to a stop. The others gathered around him, panting.

  John Wesley hunched over and dry heaved. “I think I’m gonna die,” he wheezed.

  “Where’s the thrall?” Nat asked, glancing back the way they’d come. Rance’s gunfire had fallen silent.

  Keech smiled. Yet again, Floodwood had worked its dark magic, this time leading him back to the willow. But this time the curse had saved them. Rance had been sent down another path.

  * * *

  Under the willow’s drooping shade, the group escaped the drizzle and rested as Keech explained what had happened.

  “The old man at Whistler was right. Floodwood’s got a curse on it. No matter where you want to go, you can never escape. You find yourself doubling back over your own rotten trail a dozen times.”

  The young riders contemplated Keech’s words.

  “No wonder I’ve felt so turned around,” Duck said, scratching her cheek.

  “So what about the thrall who was barkin’ iron?” asked John Wesley.

  “My guess is, Floodwood led him to a different marker,” Keech replied.

  Nat frowned. “Marker?”

  Keech gestured to the willow tree, careful not to touch any of its wriggling silver leaves. “I’ve been running from thralls for hours, and several times now I’ve come across this same confounded willow. But not every time. Twice I stumbled on a quicksand beach with a black pond. That’s where I stopped the big thrall. And just before I saw you, Floodwood carried me back to that red mountain. It’s like the curse only takes you to certain land markers.”

  “This is loco,” Cutter said.

  “No doubt about it.”

  “You mean the forest sent the dead fella shooting at us down another trail,” said Duck.

  Keech shrugged. “I took a chance it would work.”

  “A chance? You said ‘trust me.’ We thought you had a plan!” John Wesley said. There was a pea-sized hole in the high center of his straw hat, the place where a lead ball had struck it. The boy was lucky to be alive.

  Nat changed the subject by pointing to Keech’s penny at the base of the willow. “We saw your pennies. Started following them last night, a couple hours after we entered the woods to find you. Downright smart to leave a trail.”

  “I hoped you would find them,” Keech said, scooping up his penny and dropping it into his coat pocket.

  Nat took his hat off, mopped a bead of sweat off his brow. “Duck spotted the first one under a big white mushroom. We figured it belonged to you. At first we wanted to bring it, but Duck said we oughta leave it, in case you needed to find your way. We traveled what we thought was north, but we got lost as a bunch of geese. We found three more before we came to the red mountain and saw the dead outlaw.”

  Keech turned to Duck. “I’ve been using them to keep the markers sorted in my head.” Humiliation for attacking the girl at Whistler stole into his gut. “I’m sorry for the way I acted. I didn’t mean to say those things about your pa.”

  “It was sure mean,” Duck said, but she patted Keech’s arm. When he winced at the touch, her eyes widened. “Are you hurt?”

  The arm of Keech’s coat had turned scarlet. “I got nicked back at the river.”

  Duck reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her pouch of horse salve, the medicine she’d put on Minerva’s hock wound. She motioned for Keech to peel off the coat.

  “I’m no horse!” Keech protested.

  “You sure smell like one,” Cutter said, and chuckled.

  “Just take off the dang coat,” Duck said.

  Keech did as he was told. Pulling down his crude bandage, he let Duck apply a generous portion of the salve. The medicine stung like a yellow jacket, but after a moment it cooled. He tugged his bandage back over the wound, then dragged his coat back on.

  “Much obliged,” he said, then pointed at the revolver on Nat’s hip. “That’s Turner’s gun. What happened to him after I ran?”

  “We left him in town with a nice family,” Nat said. “They promised to tend his wound and fetch our horses. Sheriff handed me this and told us to find you.”

  John Wesley had peeled off his hat to examine the ragged hole in the crown. After putting it back on, he scrunched his face as if deep in thought. “So how’d you do it?” he asked Keech.

  “How’d I do what?”

  “How did you stop the thrall we found? I thought they was unstoppable and all.”

  Hearing his question, Keech knew he had to make a choice. He’d been unwilling to trust Nat’s gang or divulge anything Pa had wanted kept secret, but they had taken fire for him, had plunged into a cu
rsed forest just to rescue him. So from here on out there would be no more secrets.

  “We have more weapons than a six-shooter and Cutter’s blade. I have this,” Keech said. He pulled Pa’s pendant out of his shirt. The tarnished silver was dull under the gray sky. “This is the reason Bad Whiskey is chasing me. He took it from Pa when he stormed the orphanage. I stole it back.”

  Nat, Duck, and John Wesley stared in wonderment at the shard. Cutter was the only one who didn’t appear surprised, since he had seen the pendant back at Swift Hollow.

  “Nat, he’s got an amulet piece!” Duck said.

  Keech blinked in surprise. “What did you say?”

  Nat turned to his sister. “Go ahead. Show him, Duck.”

  Duck pulled a long, thick strand of twine out of her black coat. She showed Keech the object at the end of the twine.

  A silver crescent moon. The ornament was almost the twin of Pa Abner’s pendant.

  “Where did you get that?” Keech asked, stupefied.

  “It’s a family heirloom,” Duck said. “Our pa gave it to us a few days before he died.”

  “Now it’s obvious he meant to keep it away from the Gita-Skog,” Nat added.

  “May I see it?” Keech asked. He held out his hand. The girl gave him the silver and Keech placed the two pieces side by side. The only difference lay in the jagged teeth of the inside edges. The two fragments didn’t fit together.

  “It looks like with two or three more pieces, we could connect these shards,” he said.

  “Into a perfect circle,” John Wesley added.

  “Our pa wore that thing every day of his life,” Nat said. “I’ve always wondered what the lines and weird shapes mean. Some kind of language, I reckon.”

  “It’s no language I ever saw,” Cutter said.

  Keech handed the shard back to Duck. When the girl slid it back into her coat, her face scrunched a little. “Now that I think about it, something mighty strange happened to the necklace back at your orphanage, when Tommy Claymore got near.”

  “Let me guess, you felt it get cold,” Keech said.

  Duck nodded. “Yeah. On the trail I had to slip it off and tuck it away, it chilled me so bad. It started up again when those thralls attacked on the hill.”

  “Did it ever get cold before, when your pa kept it?” Keech asked.

  Duck shook her head. “Not that I recollect. But Pa always wore it, never let us around it.”

  A cold wind whispered across Floodwood, bristling the hairs on Keech’s arms. He glanced at the cloudy sky. A crow zigzagged overhead, doubling back on its own trail as if it didn’t know how to fly straight.

  Keech guessed Floodwood’s curse was confusing the bird, mixing up its sense of direction the same way it confused human travelers.

  He nudged a finger at the sky. “We’re being watched.”

  Nat frowned. “I reckon we need to move.”

  “But which way?” asked John Wesley.

  The gang looked to Keech. After a night of stumbling over his own tracks, there was no easy way to respond.

  Then Keech remembered the stone outcropping. The answer to navigating Floodwood lay in Pa’s painted cipher—he was sure of it.

  “We need to get back to the red mountain.”

  “But that’s where El Ojo’s dead men attacked us,” said Cutter.

  Keech shrugged. “It’s a risk, but we’ll find the path to Bone Ridge there. When we do, we’ll end this once and for all.”

  * * *

  The morning had passed to noon before the young riders found their way to the red mountain. Twice the forest had twisted them back to the willow tree, each sodden step accompanied by the terrible pressure in their ears and the maddening swell of the bumblebee noise.

  At last they came to the mountain. “About time,” Cutter groaned. By the time they made the embankment and reached the outcropping, everyone was covered in grime. From their elevated position, they could see the wild expanse of Floodwood, bathed by the gray light, a sea of black locust wilderness. But not a perpetual sea, as the curse wanted you to believe. Back to the south, Keech could see dark smoke billowing from the tree-lined horizon. The remnants of Whistler.

  The young riders gathered around Pa’s message on the rock, and Keech explained that the numbers were a code.

  “This will show us the way out. I’m sure of it.”

  Nat peered intently at the digits. “So how does it work?”

  “Most codes communicate through a common source,” Keech said. “This one uses the Bible. The first number—forty—means the book of Matthew.”

  “What do those sevens mean?” John Wesley asked.

  “Chapter 7, verse 7.”

  “How do you know the code uses the Bible?” Nat asked.

  “This isn’t the first time my pa used the Bible to send a message. He also wrote a letter, all in coded numbers. The letter was supposed to be a secret telegram to your pa, Nat. On the way to Mr. Potter’s office, my brother Sam and I broke the code. It was a warning, intended to alert your pa that the Gita-Skog was on the way.”

  Nat said nothing, only stared at the numbers on the rock.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it before,” Keech added, expecting Nat to be angry. “But when I saw this message on the rock, I knew I had to tell you.”

  Nat surprised him by smiling sadly. “I just wish the warning could’ve made it to us.”

  “Me too,” Keech said.

  “Amigos, this doesn’t solve our problem,” Cutter said. “We don’t have a Bible. We don’t know what the message on the rock means.”

  “I do,” said a small voice.

  The boys turned to see Duck, gazing at the numbers on the stone wall.

  “And you know it too, Keech. I told it to you back at Swift Hollow. Matthew 7:7. It’s the verse Pa made me memorize. ‘Ask, and it shall be given to you. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’”

  Nat looked puzzled at his sister’s revelation. “I don’t understand. Pa never said a word about that verse to me. If it’s so important, why wouldn’t he involve me?”

  “’Cause I got the good memory,” Duck said, grinning. “You got the steady hand.”

  “Fair enough. So, how does this message help us?” asked Nat.

  “Maybe it means we should search for a door to knock on,” Duck said.

  John Wesley tugged at his chin hairs. “We’re in the middle of nowheres on top of a rocky hill. Where are we gonna find a door?”

  “I reckon that’s the first challenge of the clue,” Keech answered. “We have to seek and see what there is to find.”

  CHAPTER 19

  THE CLIMB

  The freezing drizzle had stopped by the time the young riders began their search. Cutter stood watch atop the embankment as the rest of them started north, exploring the red wall around the painted code. The stone wall was too solid to offer any kind of door, so they turned toward the west, where a long row of sumac made a natural circle around the outcropping. The sumac bled down to a heavy stand of hawthorn trees that carpeted the hillside all the way down to level ground. At the edge of the tree line the group paused, and Nat looked glumly at the thicket.

  “We’d be foolish to push into that,” he said. “The forest could scatter us to kingdom come.”

  “You’re right. Let’s double back and search the east,” Keech said.

  The gang started back the way they had come. They found Cutter sitting on his knees at the muddy edge of the embankment, fidgeting with his bone-handled knife. He said nothing as they passed, only shook his head as if he couldn’t believe they were on such a harebrained mission.

  To the east the gang found a small critter path and followed it up the mountain for several yards, till they came to a tall, jagged slope of wet boulders, a treacherous mound that stretched upward at least two hundred feet or more. From all appearances, the higher point of this entire peak had tumbled loose a long time ago, creating a pelt of precarious rock th
at sat on the skin of the mountain. Toward the middle of this pile—at least a hundred feet up from the critter path—a colossal boulder jutted severely outward, shiny from the drizzle. It was almost twice the size of Copperhead Rock, and its rounded surface reminded Keech of a hunchback giant. Another hundred feet beyond, a long, thin mantel of stone capped the whole ensemble, as if the hunchback were wearing a brimmed hat made of granite.

  “Pa’s door could be up there somewhere, beyond that top ledge,” Keech said.

  Nat gave him a skeptical look. “Those rocks would go catawampus the first step.”

  “It’s not straight up. The climb wouldn’t be bad. We have to try.”

  “Fellas, I can’t climb that,” John Wesley said. “I’d topple the whole dang thing. Or just tumble down the hill and die. I don’t reckon I’d like to do neither.”

  Nat surveyed the pile again and wagged his head. “John’s right. It’s a fool’s errand.”

  “Oh, bully on that,” said Duck, and sprang past them. Before Nat could stop her, she hopped onto the boulders and started scurrying up the rain-slick mound.

  “Duck, stop!” Nat scolded. He reached out to grab her leg, but Duck was already several stones up. Nimble as a cricket, she hurtled up the untidy slope, not once looking down, planting her feet on moss-covered stones that appeared to sit only by threads and blind faith. In this fashion, she covered four wagons’ lengths in no time.

  “I demand you come down at once!” Nat yelled, as Duck clambered higher.

  Duck shouted down, “It ain’t so bad as it looks! Mighty slippery, but not too steep. Stop being chickens and come on.”

  Nat grumbled crossly and started to climb, but the slimy stones were too wobbly. He tried again, but a plate-sized rock tore out of his grip and landed with a crash beside John Wesley. He glanced at Keech with concern. “This was your idea, Blackwood. If something happens to her—”