by Tim Champlin
The deserted camp was less than a mile away. When Zane reined up and leapt off, Tom and Huck were already standing over the two kidnappers, who were still stretched on the willow frame, deserted by their Indian captors.
“Where’s our gold?” Tom shouted at them.
They ignored him, trying to turn their faces away from the hail. The sharp ice was beginning to cut the skin of their faces and arms.
“Tell us where the gold is and we’ll cut you loose,” Huck yelled.
“We spent it!” Smealey shot back at them.
“You ain’t had time to spend it.”
“We lost it in the river,” Weir said, spitting a hailstone out of his mouth.
“You woudn’t of come out this far on the trail if you didn’t have the gold,” Tom shouted. “Tell us where you hid it.”
“It ain’t on us,” Smealey said. “The Injuns took it.”
“They took your horses, but never mentioned you had no gold in your saddlebags.”
“That’s ’cause Injuns don’t care about gold, except for jewelry.”
Jim had come up by this time, and he pointed his pistol at the two men on the ground. “Dis be yo las’ chance.”
“Ah! Shooting us would be a blessing,” Smealey cried. “I’ve lost circulation in my arms and I can’t hardly breathe.”
Tom pushed Jim’s gun aside and faced the two. “If you don’t tell us where you hid the gold, we’ll mount up and ride off and let the Injuns have you. They’ll come back as soon as the storm passes and scalp you and build a fire on your chests, like they said they was gonna do. You want your livers and lungs and stuff roasted? Likely take a long time to die that way.”
That produced looks of fear on both men’s faces.
“Okay, to Hell with the gold!” Weir cried, blinking through the wet black hair hanging in his face. “We saw the Injuns comin’ for us and we stashed it over yonder in that creek bed.”
“Where, exactly?”
“I dunno. Couple hundred yards south o’ here.”
“It’s stuffed up under a tree on the bank where the water washed out the roots,” Smealey added. “Now, cut us loose, please! I’m beggin’ you.”
Tom and Huck looked at each other. “I reckon they’re tellin’ truth,” Huck said.
“Iffen I was in their britches, I would too,” Tom said, pulling out his Barlow knife and opening it. “Keep your gun on ’em, Jim.”
Tom slashed the wet rawhide thongs that were cutting into the men’s wrists and bare ankles.
The boys jumped back, ready for anything, but the kidnappers could barely move their arms and legs, and only rolled over off the sapling frame, groaning, trying to ease their stiffened limbs into some kind of motion.
“You’re on your own,” Tom said. “You’d best be footin’ it outa here. You ain’t got any boots or horses, but I’d be for runnin’.”
Zane pulled several limp strips of smoked jerky from his pocket and tossed them to the men. “Here’s some food, and there’s plenty rainwater. Follow that crick downstream a few miles and you’ll come to the Platte.”
“Yeah,” Huck said. “You’re sure to fetch up with a wagon train that’ll take you in.”
Jim and the boys mounted up and, with a last look at the two men who were now staggering around barefoot in ankle-deep hailstones, rode off toward the creek.
The hail had eased off, but it was raining a cold rain when the four guided their mounts down into the creek bed. Water was already beginning to rise as they walked their animals along downstream looking at the trees along the bank for the hiding place.
After an anxious five minutes, Tom pointed ahead. “There! That giant cottonwood.”
Tom and Huck leapt off their horses and splashed up to the projecting gnarled roots, exposed by the caving bank.
Tom dropped to his knees, ignoring the slippery mud, and thrust both arms in under the leaning tree.
“Here it is!” he shouted, pulling out a soggy canvas bag. “Both of them.” He thrust one heavy bag at Huck.
“Yaayy!!” Zane shouted.
Even Jim was grinning.
It grew suddenly darker and an ominous roar reached Zane’s ears. Alarmed, he slid out of the saddle, holding tight to the bridle.
Jim’s mule was plunging in panic.
Through the trees Zane glimpsed a huge, black funnel bearing down on them, roaring like an out-of-control freight train, tearing up the ground, bushes and trees flying in every direction.
“Down!” Zane yelled, letting go of the burro and diving under the lip of the bank. The others were there a second later.
It was over so fast, Zane could never recall what happened.
Stunned, Zane and the boys rose from their position a minute later, and looked at the receding funnel ripping a path across the grassland toward the northeast.
A fifty-yard-wide swath had been cut in the trees lining the creek. Splintered trees, rocks, and limbs lay everywhere.
Zane’s heart was pounding and he felt weak. He sat down on a rock to catch his breath.
Tom and Huck climbed the bank and looked back toward the deserted Sioux camp.
Jim and Zane joined them a minute later.
“Dey be gone, Huck,” Jim said, scanning the empty landscape.
“We give ’em a chance,” Huck said. “I reckon Providence had other plans.”
“Providence, your granny!” Tom snorted as they went back to retrieve their scattered mounts. “Them two are survivors. They’ll turn up again, you can bet on it—and they’ll be up to some mischief or other.”
By the time they’d gathered their uninjured animals, and mounted up, Zane saw Carrick galloping toward them.
“Thank God you’re all right,” he said, reining up. His buckskins were plastered to him by the rain, but he was grinning. “When we make camp and dry out, I want to hear your story.”
CHAPTER 27
* * *
Five days later, Becky, Jim, Tom, Huck, and Zane were standing in front of the sutler’s store at Fort Kearny.
Hundreds of wagons were arriving and departing along the trail nearby, coming and going from the rustic fort that was only a small cluster of buildings and warehouses.
Andre Carrick’s wagon train was preparing to pull out and continue along the trail to the west. The scout came out of the store and paused to tell them goodbye.
He yanked off his gloves and held out his hand to each of them in turn. “I wish all of you were continuing on west with us,” he said. “It’s been quite an adventure so far, having you along.”
“Thanks. Maybe next year.”
“I hope my father has received word by now that I’m all right,” Becky said, “but I do need to start home.”
“Taken all around, things didn’t turn out too badly,” the scout said. “You’ve escaped from your kidnappers and now have most of your ransom back. You young folks are about as resourceful as any I’ve ever met. Jim, you should be proud of them.”
“Yassuh. Ah’s mighty proud.”
Carrick started to turn away, then stopped. “I talked to the colonel, and he said you could accompany the patrol he’s sending back down the trail in the morning toward St. Joe. Only a squad of half dozen soldiers, but they’ll make sure you don’t have any more trouble, although I can’t imagine why you’d need them, except maybe to protect that gold.” He paused and looked out at the hundreds of people milling about in the parade ground, which was enclosed by a rectangle of several sod buildings and three or four wooden ones. “This ain’t much of a fort, but it’s a good re-supply post.”
He turned back to them. “The best of luck to you.” He waved and strode away.
“Ah ’spect de widow be wonderin’ what happen to me,” Jim said. “And ah sorta misses de ole place.”
“Well, you didn’t have to shoot nobody with the widow’s gun this trip,” Tom said.
“Nossuh. Ah’s glad o’ dat. She can have it back.”
“Zane, you come a long way,�
�� Huck said. “You figurin’ to head back home?”
Zane had been pondering this very thing for the past few days. “You know, I don’t know how I wound up here, so I sure don’t know how to go back.”
“That’s a vexsome question, sure enough.”
“So, until Providence shows me the way home, I reckon I’ll stick around for a time.” He thought of his useless cell phone, which was stowed in his saddlebags.
What would he require to stay on here? New glasses so he could read. He wondered what that Sioux warrior was doing with his old spectacles.
There must be an optometrist in St. Louis who could correct his vision with new glasses and make his eyes ready to see new adventures.
“Well,” Tom said, “your parents won’t miss you because they haven’t been born yet, and neither have your great-grandparents. So I reckon you’re free to hang around and we’ll all have some rollicksome times. We’ll find you a room somers in our village. If you’re here come fall, you can go to school with us, though I ain’t recommendin’ that for winter fun.”
“Thanks.”
He shook hands with the boys and Jim. Becky gave him a hug to show he was welcome. A feeling of joy and freedom surged up in Zane like he’d never felt before.
He was confident he’d see his family again. But in only a few weeks, he’d survived some thrilling adventures here, and looked forward to more.
“You reckon there’s any such thing as a hamburger around here?” Zane wondered. “I’m starved.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
In the years following publication of his two best-known novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain made several attempts to continue the boys’ adventures. But, for whatever reasons, he could never recapture the magic of those first two books.
As an adult, I was thrilled to discover in a university library those later stories—“Tom Sawyer Abroad,” “Tom Sawyer, Detective,” “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians,” and “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.” I felt I had unearthed hitherto unknown treasures, but I was disappointed. Those later stories were not all complete, and their writing was not nearly as good as the earlier books I’d read as a twelve year old.
In August, 1948, two months before my eleventh birthday, my father was transferred from Nebraska to Jefferson City, Missouri. There we lived until December, 1952, when the family moved to Arizona. Thus, through nearly four and a half of my formative years, I lived along the Missouri River and roamed the woods and creeks of Mark Twain’s home state.
During that time, it was still possible for a boy in Missouri to live much as Tom and Huck had done a century earlier. Of course we had things unknown to Tom and Huck, such as cars and bicycles, electric lights and telephones, radios and movies. On the other hand, we still lacked air-conditioning, television, and such adult-organized sports as Little League baseball. (In those days soccer—so far as we knew—was a game played only in other countries.) And, of course, this was long before satellites, personal computers, cell phones, space travel, and the plethora of electronic devices with which twenty-first-century children are familiar today.
Except for reading (a constant) and board games, there was little to do inside a stuffy house on a nice day. We spent most of our waking hours outdoors using imagination to create games, making many of our own toys—slingshots from tree branches, a five-foot-long wooden boat to launch in the creek—and building a fort in the woods from an empty packing crate, cutting thorn bushes to encircle and defend it. Pretending it was pirate treasure, we buried coins from our collections, then drew an elaborate map to its hiding place. (But we could never find the spot again. The treasure lies there yet.) We explored the town and surrounding countryside on our bikes, played pick-up baseball in the park, climbed trees, made Indian bows, fletching the arrows with chicken feathers, and developed and printed our own black and white film in a basement darkroom. We seined for minnows and crawdads, fished for bluegill and catfish, shelled and ate sunflower seeds, chewed bubble gum, shot BB guns, played kick-the-can, fox-and-the-walnut, and camped out with our dogs in an army surplus pup tent. In winter, we threw ourselves headfirst on sleds, shooting down steep, snowy trails that snaked through the woods. We built snow forts and engaged in epic snowball fights.
Parents were doing whatever grown-ups did then—and that did not include hovering over us to direct our every move, to protect us from danger, to dampen our inventiveness or kill our fun. We were told to go outside and play and be back by suppertime. Parents trusted us to take care of ourselves, and, luckily, we got into trouble only now and then. Much like Mark Twain in his later years, I have great nostalgia for those idyllic times.
Not only was Mark Twain forever captivated by the experiences of his boyhood, he was also intrigued with time travel and historical settings, as demonstrated in such tales as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, and his unfinished “Mysterious Stranger” stories.
What, then, would a new Tom and Huck adventure be without a time traveler? And what better time traveler than a boy named Zane from the twenty-first century? Was it Chance or Luck that threw this mysterious stranger into their midst to complicate a crisis that arose that very day?
Tom and Huck would have blamed it on Providence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
Tim Champlin was born in Fargo, North Dakota, the son of a large-animal veterinarian and a schoolteacher. He grew up in Nebraska, Missouri, and Arizona where he was graduated from St. Mary’s High School, Phoenix, before moving to Tennessee.
After earning a BS degree from Middle Tennessee State College, he declined an offer to become a Border Patrol Agent in order to finish work on a Master of Arts in English at Peabody College (now part of Vanderbilt University).
After 39 rejection slips, he sold his first piece of writing in 1971 to Boating magazine. The photo article, “Sailing the Mississippi,” is a dramatic account of a three-day, 75-mile solo adventure on the Big River from Memphis, Tennessee, to Helena, Arkansas, in a sixteen-foot fiberglass sailboat built from a kit in his basement. His only means of propulsion were river current, sails, and a canoe paddle.
Since then, 38 of his historical novels have been published. Most are set in the Frontier West. A handful of them touch on the Civil War. Others deal with juvenile time travel, a clash between Jack the Ripper and Annie Oakley, the lost Templar treasure, and Mark Twain’s hidden recordings.
Besides books, he’s written several dozen short stories and nonfiction articles, plus two children’s books. One of his most recent books is a nonfiction survey of world-famous author Louis L’Amour and the Wild West.
He has twice been runner-up for a Spur Award from Western Writers of America—once for his novel The Secret of Lodestar and once for his short story “Color at Forty-Mile.”
Tim is still creating enthralling new tales. Most of his books are available online as ebooks.
In 1994 he retired after working thirty years in the U.S. Civil Service. He and his wife, Ellen, have three grown children and ten grandchildren.
Active in sports all his life, he continues biking, shooting,sailing, and playing tennis.
The employees of Five Star Publishing hope you have enjoyed this book.
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