“Oh, dear,” said Uncle Richie. “My great-niece is correct. Good sir? Kindly disregard anything I said about treasure or the hunting of it.”
“No problem. But, if you folks are fans of the Mosby legends, check out our walls. We’ve got all sorts of memorabilia hanging on them. Including a few pages from Colonel Mosby’s private journal.”
“Bully!” said Uncle Richie.
“Do you also have a basement?” I asked.
“No,” said the cashier. “And the next time you see Ms. Rhodes over at the library, kindly ask her to stop telling people that we do! Next!”
We moved into the dining room so the cashier could ring up other customers.
“Here is his handwritten journal,” said Storm, pointing to a frame displaying two scraps of antique parchment.
“Cool,” I said. “If only he’d written down instructions about where he hid his loot.”
Storm leaned in and peered at the two pages. One was completely covered in inky scribblings. The other page was half empty.
Storm tapped the glass on the frame. The side without any writing.
“Maybe he did leave us instructions,” she whispered. “Uncle Richie?”
“Yes, Storm?”
“Could you please go back to the counter and order a cup of tea? Maybe a grilled cheese sandwich? Some hot soup would be good, too.”
“Hungry, eh?”
“Nope.”
She tapped the glass again. “See that F?”
We all leaned in and peered at the ancient paper. There was a tiny F inked into the corner.
“What does it mean?” asked Ms. Johnston.
“That there’s something on this paper written in invisible ink,” Storm whispered. “It’s an old code from the Revolutionary War. British spies used to mark their dispatches written in invisible ink with a F for flame or an A for acid. If you heat this document with a flame, stuff written in invisible ink will appear on the paper. We don’t have a candle to hold up to this glass, but maybe some steaming hot food will do the trick.”
We all raced back to the counter and ordered one of every steaming item they had on the menu, along with several cups of coffee, tea, and cocoa. Then we all huddled around the framed document, warming it with our food and drinks.
Storm was right.
Slowly, lines that had been penned in invisible ink started to appear on the blank half of the second sheet of paper until they revealed a map.
One that led from a crossroads, into the forest, and two trees marked with Xs.
Mosby’s long-lost treasure was about to be found!
CHAPTER 34
We hurried out of the ice cream shop and grabbed the shovels and rock-prying bar out of our van.
“Lead on, Storm!” cried Uncle Richie. “Lead on!”
“Yeah,” said Ms. Johnston. “Show me the money!”
Storm pointed toward the intersection. “When the light changes, we need to cross that highway and cut through the Wawa parking lot.”
Wawa, in case you didn’t know, is a convenience store, like a 7-Eleven. So far, this was probably the weirdest, most suburban treasure hunt we’d ever been on.
“Cut through these trees,” said Storm, indicating a tidy clump at the edge of the Wawa parking lot. “This way.”
She, of course, had memorized the treasure map. She’d just scanned it into her hard drive, the same way a computer would. It really is incredible the way Storm’s mind works sometimes.
“This used to be a forest,” she remarked, as we hiked through several well-manicured backyards, toting our digging tools, looking like grave robbers.
Tommy banged the pry bar against a swing set. “Oops. Sorry about that.”
“Shhhh!” whispered Uncle Richie. “Stealth and silence are essential to a mission such as ours, Thomas!”
“Right. Gotcha. My bad. But, in my defense, I didn’t see the swing set and—”
“Shhhh!” We all said it. Even Ms. Johnston.
Storm gave us a series of intricate hand signal directions, the kind we do when we’re diving. We needed to head into a thick grove of dark trees.
We crunched into what was starting to feel like an undeveloped section of forest.
“This is probably exactly how it was during the Civil War!” I said out loud, because we had moved far enough away from any homes.
“Indeed,” said Uncle Richie. “One can easily imagine Mosby and his raiders riding across this very same ground on horseback.”
Tommy started sniffing. “I can even smell the horse poop,” he said.
“From the Civil War?” said Beck.
“No,” said Tommy, examining the bottom of his shoe. “I think this is fresh.”
Suddenly, I heard a distant howl of a bloodhound.
“You guys?” I said. “Do you think we’re being followed?”
“That was just a dog, Bick,” said Beck. “A lot of people in the suburbs have dogs.”
“How much farther, Storm?” asked Uncle Richie, sounding eager to end our adventure in the deep woods, even if the howling was only coming from a beagle in its backyard.
“It should be somewhere right around here,” said Storm.
“Fan out, children,” said Uncle Richie. “Remember: We are looking for a pair of pine trees marked with Xs!”
“Wouldn’t they have disappeared by now?” asked Beck.
“The actual marks, perhaps. Their scars? Never. Look for any unnaturally crisscrossing lumps or bumps in the bark.”
“Just the pine trees, though, right?” said Tommy.
“Correct.”
We spread out, miniature flashlights swinging.
I started rubbing pine trees. My fingers got sticky from sap.
But I didn’t feel any Xs on any trees.
Just one short, bumpy gash, swollen over with a mound of bark. It was a huge evergreen tree. Like it might’ve been standing there for more than a century.
It was ten feet away from another towering giant.
I went over to examine its bark.
And saw another lumpy gash.
“You guys?” I called out. “I might’ve found something. Here. And over there!”
“Bully!” shouted Uncle Richie. He came running over, his flashlight bobbing with every stride. The others came bounding over, too. Everybody’s beams of light started flying up and down the bark of the twin pines.
“Um, I don’t see one X,” said Beck. “Let alone two!”
I grinned. “Maybe we’re not supposed to be looking for an X mark,” I said.
“What are you suggesting, Bick?” said Uncle Richie, with a twinkle in his eye.
“That what we’re really supposed to be looking for is…”
I waited, just to build up the suspense. It’s fun to do sometimes. Especially in the middle of a dark forest in the middle of the night.
“What?” said Beck, who’s not big on suspense. “What are we supposed to be looking for?”
I couldn’t torture them any longer.
“A pair of ax marks. Not X marks. Ax marks.” I pointed to the two trees. “Like those right there.”
CHAPTER 35
“Eureka!” cried Uncle Richie. “Well done, Bick! We need to start digging!”
“Where?” asked Tommy eagerly.
“We’ll burrow out a trench between these two pines. Break up the roots and rocks with the pry bar, Tommy. Bick and Beck? You handle the first shift on the shovels.”
“Good idea,” said Storm. She’s not big on manual labor. Prefers brain work to brawn work.
Tommy pried out the rocks and roots. Beck and I dug. And dug.
Those hounds in the distance? That’s right—the howling had gone plural. Plus, they sounded closer, too.
After thirty minutes, Tommy and Uncle Richie took over on the digging. Beck and I took turns slamming the pry bar. Ms. Johnston cheered us on. Storm worked on her pine cone collection.
Thirty more minutes passed. Beck and I were back on shovel du
ty. Ms. Johnston had started breaking rocks. Uncle Richie and Tommy were squeezing the sweat out of their shirts. Storm was stacking her pine cones into a pretty nifty-looking pyramid.
Our trench was ten feet long, three feet deep, and, so far, empty. Except for rocks and roots and a rusty soda pop can from the late 1980s.
“Maybe Bick was wrong,” suggested Storm. “Maybe those weren’t the two trees.”
“Chya,” said Tommy. “Although all this shoveling and pry bar slamming has totally pumped up my guns.” He flexed his arm muscles for Ms. Johnston.
She rolled her eyes.
I scooped up another load of dirt.
And the next time I sank my shovel into the ground, I felt something softy and mushy rip open.
Then I heard a clink, clink, tinkle, tinkle.
The kind of sound gold coins make when they tumble out of a torn burlap sack that’s been rotting in the ground for more than a hundred years.
Beck and I dropped to our knees and scraped away more dirt by hand. Pretty soon, we saw it all: gold coins, jewelry, fancy candlesticks, silverware (the kind made out of real silver).
“It’s Mosby’s treasure!” shouted Beck. “Quick! Someone take a picture! The Enlightened Ones wanted photographic evidence of our treasure find.”
Tommy knelt down and snapped several photos. Then he grabbed a couple thumbs-up selfies with the pile of pirate booty in the background.
“How much gold is that?” asked Ms. Johnston, grabbing a snapshot with her cell phone, too.
“A ton!” I said.
Storm quickly corrected me. “That doesn’t look like two thousand pounds of gold and merchandise, Bick.”
“Well, you said all this stuff was worth three hundred and fifty thousand dollars back in the day, which would be five and a half million dollars today! If you ask me, that’s a ton!”
Uncle Richie scooped up a handful of coins and examined them.
“Ah! 1861 Liberty Head Double Eagles,” he said. “Minted with gold from the California gold rush. Each coin was worth twenty dollars at the dawn of the civil war. Now you could melt one down and sell its gold for more than a thousand dollars. Or, you could sell it to a collector for ten times that amount. But nothing is more valuable than this lovely lady circled by thirteen stars. Miss Liberty, herself. She is what the boys in blue were fighting for. Liberty! Freedom! America!”
Ms. Johnston applauded slowly. “Nice speech, Poppie,” she said. “But don’t forget our deal. I’m still selling my third of all that loot.”
“As you wish, Pamela. As you wish. It’s just that, sometimes, we true treasure hunters are momentarily overwhelmed by the historical—”
He didn’t get to finish that thought.
In all the excitement about digging up the buried treasure, we’d sort of stopped paying attention to all those sounds in the distance.
Like the baying of bloodhounds.
And now the pounding of horse hooves.
It was like a nighttime foxhunt was underway in the forests of Virginia.
And we were the foxes they were hunting.
CHAPTER 36
The hounds arrived at our treasure ditch first.
They were yapping and barking and woofing like crazy.
The horses and riders showed up like ten seconds later. There were four of them carrying torches, decked out in Confederate cavalry uniforms—and looking extremely scary.
Except the leader.
I’m sorry. The guy was maybe five feet tall and nearly bounced out of his saddle when the horses came galloping through the trees. He was also wearing the red jacket, white pants, and tiny black helmet that foxhunters wear in oil paintings.
“Whoa!” the leader of the night riders cried out, tugging back hard on his reins. “I said, ‘Whoa!’ Stop! Quit walking, horse!”
The horse ignored him and started prancing around in circles while making slobbery lip fart noises and flapping its flyswatter of a tail.
One of the other raiders reached over and yanked back on the leader’s reins, trying to settle the boss’s horse. But when he leaned in, he dipped his flaming torch right in front of the horse’s face, which spooked that horse, which spooked all of the other horses.
“Are you an idiot, Beauregard?” shouted the tiny leader, hanging on to his helmet, as his frightened steed tried to buck him out of the saddle. “How much am I paying you idiots?”
“Who you callin’ an idiot?” said the night rider, twirling his torch menacingly, which spooked the horses even more.
“Stand back, everybody,” advised Uncle Richie. “This might be the gentleman in red’s first pony ride.”
As the horses bucked, all the torches started bobbing up and down, creating quite a fiery light show, which none of the horses seemed to be enjoying. They reared up on their hind legs. They kicked with their front hooves. They neighed in terror.
And that made the dogs start howling, which scared the horses even more.
I looked at Beck. She looked at me. We both shook our heads.
We’ve encountered a lot of bad guys on our treasure-hunting adventures. So far, these guys were the lamest.
While the riders coaxed their horses, Tommy tried, nonchalantly, to block everybody’s view of our unburied treasure, sitting right there, scattered in the ditch.
“Easy, boy!” said the leader.
“That’s a girl, sir,” said one of his riders.
“Easy, girl!” said the leader.
“Might I suggest you douse your torches?” said Uncle Richie, trying to be helpful. “Horses don’t like fire.”
“Neither do we,” said Storm.
“Fine. Whatever,” said the leader. “Dump the torches in the ditch, you idiots.”
Torches were tossed into our pit. Before they extinguished themselves, they cast a flickering orange light on our glittering pile of gold and silver.
“Well, well, well,” said the leader, smiling smugly. “Would you look at that? I believe you interlopers have uncovered my treasure for me.”
“Excuse me?” said Storm. “What makes you think any of our backbreaking manual labor was done for you?”
“Allow me to introduce myself,” said the little man, sliding sideways in his saddle and easing himself, slowly, to the ground. When he finally did, he adjusted all his fancy riding clothes to make certain they still looked fancy. “My name is Milton T. Mosby, formerly from Minnetonka, Minnesota.”
“Mosby?” I said. “Like in ‘Mosby’s Raiders’?”
“That’s right, little man. Colonel John Mosby was my great-great-great-great-great-great uncle. And that treasure down there? That’s Mosby’s treasure. That means it’s mine!”
CHAPTER 37
“I beg to differ with you, good sir,” said Uncle Richie. “We are the ones who followed the clues, which led to the treasure map, which led us to this spot between two pine trees.”
“Well,” said Milton Mosby, “I guess I’m just smarter than you idiots. I skipped the first two parts—the annoying bit with the clues and the map—and just followed you. It was a whole lot easier.” He tapped his temple. “Like I said, I’m a whole lot smarter than any of you will ever be.”
“Ha,” said Storm. “Prove it.”
She immediately launched into a classic brain teaser.
“There are three houses. One is red, one is blue, and one is white. If the red house is to the left of the house in the middle, and the blue house is to the right of the house in the middle, where is the white house?”
“Easy,” scoffed Milton Mosby. “In the middle.”
“No,” said Storm. “The White House is in Washington, DC.”
She held up her right palm. I slapped her a high five. Beck slapped her five downtown on the left.
Mosby fumed.
“I’m also a multibillionaire!” he shouted.
“Congratulations, sir,” said Ms. Johnston, with a sweet smile. The lady seemed to be super-interested in money.
“Thank you
. I give away a good deal of money to charity and scholarly research.”
“How about Most Humble Man in the World?” asked Beck. “Is that you, too?”
“Not sure. The voting isn’t until next month. But, fingers crossed.”
“If I may,” said Uncle Richie, “how did you even know we would be on a treasure hunt in this neck of the woods this evening?”
“Easy. Smart, rich people like me pay poor, simpering idiots like that skinny kid with the pimples at the ice cream parlor to text them anytime people seem more interested in Mosby’s Treasure than Moose Tracks, Rocky Road, or salted caramel.”
He jabbed a thumb over his soldiers at the riders dressed up like Rebel Raiders. “I keep these scary gentlemen with torches and horses on retainer.”
One of the riders shrugged. “It’s just a hobby.”
“We’re Civil War reenactors,” said another one.
“I need to get my uniform dry cleaned,” said a third, wiping stringy horse slobber off his pants leg. “Again.”
Milton T. Mosby marched over to Uncle Richie like a preening peacock.
“Wait a second,” said Mosby. “You’re Richie ‘Poppie’ Luccio. I’ve heard about you. You’re a famous, or should I say, infamous treasure hunter. Dr. Hingleburt, whose brilliant research I support with beaucoup bucks, told me your sad tale. Something about a treasure you donated to a museum in Australia but then you took it all back because you admitted it was fake and you were a fraud. That’s you, am I right?”
“Yes,” said Uncle Richie, smiling gamely. “I suppose it is.”
“Well, don’t worry. You won’t have to donate this treasure to a museum and then ask for it back because, guess what? I’m taking it all.”
“I’d like to see you try,” said Tommy, stepping forward bravely.
“Careful, sonny boy. My men have weapons.”
All-American Adventure Page 8
