10
Thorn usually began a hunt at Marshal Wolcott’s office. The marshal had an extensive filing system with collected information on every bounty and police case throughout the provinces going back to the days of his grandfather. It was, originally, his grandfather’s project as a part of his own crime-fighting endeavors. James Wolcott had inherited not only his grandfather’s files, but his knack for systematic organization that made such a filing system possible, and Thorn was more than happy to avail himself of the information that Marshal Wolcott was capable of providing.
Marshal Wolcott looked up over the newspaper he was reading when Thorn entered and hung his wide-brimmed hat on the rack.
“Bounties by the door,” Marshal Wolcott growled. “Didn’t expect you back so soon after that beating you took.”
“Who, me? I’m fit as a fiddle,” Thorn said. He smirked, as his face was still visibly swollen and his arm still tingled with pain. “Speaking of Arnold Keech they take him back yet?”
“Just loaded him up in the prison wagon this morning, and it’s a huge weight off my shoulders to get that maniac out of here.”
“Yours and mine both. I picked up a new job and I was looking for some direction to get started.”
“Private job?”
“So far. I’m looking for a gang and wondered if you might have something on them.”
“You want to know if they’re wanted for something else so you can clean up with a double bounty.”
“You know me so well.”
“What gang are they? I’ve got lots of information on the gangs that roam the Free Lands.”
“I don’t know. Never heard of them before and don’t know much about them except that they sport a tattoo under their eye of a skull and crossed hands.”
“You know, there was something that came in recently,” Marshal Wolcott said as he folded the newspaper and kicked away from his desk. He led Thorn into his filing room in the back, turning left down the hallway that, in the other direction, led to the cells. The room was filled from floor to ceiling with filing cabinets, each one meticulously labeled and catalogued. And this was just the more recent stuff. A trap door led down to a huge room filled with filing cabinets which contained everything going back to the days of Marshal Wolcott’s grandfather.
A small basket on a short cabinet by the door held a few recent papers that hadn’t been filed yet. Marshal Wolcott licked his thumb and began flipping through these.
“I didn’t put anything on the bounty board because I didn’t know what to make of it. Ah, here it is. Seems this fellow out of Webster Grove was making a shipment of grains when his cart was attacked and robbed by a gang of young men with yellow bandanas over their faces. They had skeleton hands on them and they rode yellow bikes.”
“That’s a lot of yellow. Does it say anything about a tattoo?”
“Nope, but it gets stranger. This fellow said his cart was robbed, but when the investigators filed the report with the local police they didn’t find anything missing from his inventory. And here’s the reason I dismissed the account: he said their leader was a ghost. I figured he’d just been hitting the grain alcohol, wrecked his carriage, and blamed the whole thing on a ghost bandit rather than face the wrath of his employer.”
“A ghost bandit?”
“He told investigators that it was the ghost of Court Raleigh.”
“That name sounds familiar, is it someone I should know?”
Marshal Wolcott laughed. “Thorn, you seem more local than the locals; sometimes I forget that you’re a transplant. Here, take a seat and I’ll tell you the story of the Amber Bones. You hungry? The Widow Tahnee dropped off a basket of biscuits and apple butter this morning.”
Marshal Wolcott didn’t wait for a response before he ducked into the next room down from the filing room and emerged with a basket of biscuits wrapped in a blue towel. He moved the papers on the short cabinet to the floor and set the basket in their place. He produced a pair of butter knives before disappearing back into the other room.
Thorn broke a biscuit and began slathering apple butter on it. “When are you going to marry her?” he called.
“I’m not the marrying type,” Marshal Wolcott grunted from the other room. He primed a small piezo-pump to boil a fresh pot of coffee before returning and taking one of the biscuits.
“Afraid she might stop feeding you so well once she lands you?” Thorn asked between bites.
“Do you want to hear this story or not?”
Thorn bowed his head slightly.
“This goes back to before the Western Frontier was settled, back when pioneers first started moving out of Bradenfield and discovered the fertile grounds west of the Old Foss. Back then if you were still within spitting distance of the river you were considered to be far west. I suppose they’ll say the same thing about us some day. But there were a couple of brothers who made their living preying on the settlers and trade caravans as they trekked west. Their names were Court and Cade Raleigh. Court was the elder and he was one of the meanest, cruelest people to ever darken the Free Lands. He kept his brother in line by beating him regularly so he’d stay just as mean as he was.”
“Were they real people?”
Marshal Wolcott shrugged. “Who knows? My grandfather’s records don’t even go back that far. The legend became bigger than either of them, but like most folk stories there was probably a kernel of truth to it. That was a very dangerous time to be living west of the river. A few of those settlements got wiped out entirely by raiders. But these two, the Raleigh brothers, they lived in the caves out in the wilderness and stashed their stolen money out there. They painted the entrance to their cave amber so they’d always be able to find it. They used the cactus flower, I believe. When you crush it you can mix it with some other stuff and it makes an amber dye. People still use it for clothing. According to legend they filled their cave with millions of dollars’ worth of stolen property. It was jam-packed with treasures from the far corners of the provinces, stolen from settlers and trade caravans alike.”
“They were able to take down trade caravans?”
Marshal Wolcott had gone into the other room to pour each of them a mug of coffee. He brought a bowl of sugar and a pitcher of cream. He offered them to Thorn but Thorn waved them off. Marshal Wolcott sat down and spooned some sugar into his coffee before filling it to the brim with cream. Thorn brought his mug to his nose and savored the aroma as Marshal Wolcott continued.
“Trade caravans didn’t wield the kind of power they do today. They were small, just nomads, basically, making a living by buying and selling their goods to the different towns. People didn’t have access to the kinds of easy transportation like they do now. Most of that technology came out of Crimson City and we just learned from it. I guess I don’t need to tell you that. The trade caravans started arming themselves out of necessity just so they could survive out there until they became the monstrosities they are today. But that’s another story.”
Marshal Wolcott took a sip from the coffee and cut open another biscuit.
“Anyway, Court Raleigh’s luck ran out and he fell into a trap set by a powerful merchant that he’d robbed many times over. This merchant thought that if he could get his hands on the Raleigh brothers’ stash of stolen treasure that’d more than make up for what they’d stolen from him over the years. So he interrogated Court Raleigh. Tortured him. Never got a thing from him though. Court was too mean and spiteful to be broken and the more he was tortured the meaner and more spiteful he got. So the merchant decided to change his tactics. He let Court Raleigh go, with the intent of having him followed back to his secret stash.
“Court was mean but he wasn’t stupid. He figured the reason that merchant had let him go, so he laid in wait for the men that were following him and killed them all. Sent their heads back via post.
“What neither Court Raleigh nor that merchant knew, however, was that while they were doing their thing Court’s brother, Cade, had betrayed them both. Ca
de wanted to get back at his brother for all those beatings, and it was on account of him that Court had fallen into the merchant’s trap to begin with. Then once Court Raleigh was captured, Cade took that whole stash of treasure for himself, and to cover his betrayal he went through the hills and painted every rock with that amber dye. When Court went to look for his cave he couldn’t find it. They were all amber. He wandered those hills like a man possessed screaming his brother’s name, looking into the caves searching for his lost treasure. He didn’t eat nor drink, but kept himself going out of pure hatred. He withered away until there was nothing left but his bones, and they had soaked up so much of that amber dye that they became the same color as the hills. He never found his treasure, and no one ever knew what became of Cade, either. But people traveling at night have been seeing the amber skeleton of Court Raleigh stalking the hills ever since.”
Thorn was nodding while he sipped his coffee. “I’ve heard Nate tell that story to the children many times at the pub. Never really listened to it or attached any significance, though.”
“It’s an old legend. A folk story. It tells how the rocks around here got their peculiar color. If you ask me all people are seeing is the quartz in the strata. When the moonlight hits them just right they look like rib bones. Add an overactive imagination and the loneliness of the wilderness and, well, you get the picture.”
“I don’t know; something spooked this fellow out of Webster Grove.” Thorn was scanning the report. “Says his name is Brad Hadlik. What’s this note down here?” He pointed to the bottom of the page, to a string of numbers in Marshal Wolcott’s small and tidy handwriting.
Marshal Wolcott wiped his hands before taking the paper. “This is a catalogue note.”
He went to the filing cabinet marked Miscellaneous and flicked through the files before selecting one.
“Well, well,” he said to himself as he read the file. “It appears this isn’t the first time this has happened. I’ve got a few more incidents over the past half a year of merchant shipments being attacked by the ghost of Court Raleigh, with nothing having been stolen. I stuck them all together here in the miscellaneous file because I didn’t know what to make of them.”
Thorn was reading over Marshal Wolcott’s shoulder. “Looks like they all worked for the same shipping company. L & D, out of Webster Grove. Looks like as good a place as any to start.”
Marshal Wolcott shrugged as he refiled the papers. “It’s not much, and it probably doesn’t mean anything. L & D Shipping is pretty much the only shipping company anymore. They’re the only ones getting hit because they’re the only ones in town.”
“Still, it’s the only lead I’ve got.” Thorn shelled out a dollar for the information and the use of the marshal’s filing system. “One more thing. I don’t know if it’s related or not. It was Rich Tanning’s kid that ran away. When I was in Crooked Crag I saw a few posters for other teenagers that were missing. Have you seen an increase in the number of runaways or missing teens recently?”
“Yeah. Over the past six months, or so, reports have been increasing at an alarming rate. I didn’t know we had that many teens in the Western Frontier.”
“Six months, you say? Any pattern to it?”
Marshal Wolcott was flipping through the filing cabinet marked Missing Persons. He withdrew dozens of reports. “These are from the past six months alone. I figured they were just teens being rebellious teens, but you’re right. There is something suspicious going on. They seem to be from all over. Mostly small towns. You don’t think they’re all joining this new gang?”
“I don’t know what to think yet. You said this fellow Hadlik was set upon by a bunch of youngsters on dune bikes, right? It would make sense.”
“It’s about the only thing that makes sense.”
“I’ll check it out. Tell the Widow Tahnee thanks for the biscuits.”
Marshal Wolcott grunted. “Tell her yourself.”
When he looked up from refiling the missing persons reports Thorn was gone.