“And fills our eyes with smoke.”
Keech sat upright, realizing he’d spoken Pa’s words aloud. The campfire in the clearing had burned down to gray dust, with the smallest hints of cinder beneath. Out of habit, Keech reached under his shirt to touch his charm—the Ranger’s charm, actually, but now his.
The shard was missing.
Startled, he patted down his body and searched through his bedding. As he rummaged, he called out, “Everyone, wake up! It’s gone.”
“What’s gone?” Quinn’s tired voice answered.
“Doyle’s pendant.” Keech glanced around the campsite. He saw Duck sitting up, quickly alert, and Quinn rubbing sleep out of his eyes. The spot on the ground where Doyle had been resting was vacant. All that remained was the man’s blanket, neatly folded on the dead grass. At the bending tree, the ponies stood tied off to the boughs, their heads drooped in slumber.
There was no sign of Saint Peter.
“Where’s the Ranger?” Duck asked.
“Good question.” Keech pulled on his boots. He was careful not to move. He wanted to read the clearing. He looked at the first yellow rays of day breaking over the horizon and realized they had slept for more than twelve hours. A light snow from the night before coated the camp, but there were no horse tracks leading out. Keech did notice the faintest indication of moccasin prints near their bedding, but the fresh snow had filled most of the divots.
“I can’t believe we slept so long,” Duck said.
“We needed it,” Keech replied, but still he wanted to kick himself. After days of hard riding and brutal fighting, they had all been so exhausted that they could have slept through the Siege of Fort Texas and not stirred.
“Where’s Cutter?” said Quinn.
Keech peered past the clearing. “Still in the woods, I reckon. He wanted to be alone.”
“But it’s been twelve hours,” Quinn pointed out. “Shouldn’t he be back?”
“Fellas, I think we got a problem,” Duck said. She had begun patting her own coat, and now panic cascaded across her features. She searched through her blanket. When she looked up, her face was ashen. “My charm’s gone, too.”
Uneasiness whittled its way into Keech’s gut. He reached into his coat pocket and felt for Strong Bones’s deerskin sheath. His fingers wrapped around a blade hilt, and for a second, he breathed in relief. Then he realized the hilt’s texture was all wrong. He pulled the blade out of his pocket and looked at it. It wasn’t the Fang of Barachiel.
It was Doyle’s knife.
“No!” Keech yelled.
The trio scoured the campsite for any sign of the two missing shards or the bone dagger. When nothing turned up, Duck threw up her hands. “He stole everything.”
“No way,” Quinn said. “He wouldn’t do that.”
Except Keech knew he would. Doyle had made it clear that nothing mattered more to him than his family. I went out of my mind with grief, the man had told them while sharing the story of Eliza’s death. My wife, Gerty, and John Wesley wanted to mourn and move on. I couldn’t.
“I’d wager he decided on this plan when John Wesley went off into the woods,” Keech said. “He had no more family left to lose. He knew when we went to sleep that we’d be easy pickings.”
“But why ditch us?” Quinn asked. “Why not take us with him?”
“Because we’d try to stop him,” Duck answered. “He knew we’d never go along with a scheme to resurrect his daughter.”
“And since Saint Peter never leaves tracks, I reckon we’ve got no way of finding him,” Keech said.
Stomping over to the spot where Doyle had slept, Duck kicked at the abandoned blanket with a furious shout. A small cloth bag tumbled out of the folds. “What’s that?”
Keech snatched up the bag, hearing something jangle. When he opened it, he saw no relics, only a small book and a few coins.
The book was Doyle’s leatherbound journal, the one he had scrawled in while investigating the bent sugar maple near the Kansas River. A blue ribbon marker lay tucked inside, along with Doyle’s pencil. Keech held the journal up for Duck and Quinn to see, then flipped through the pages. Doyle had scribbled hundreds of entries, each one beginning with the date.
When Keech reached the blue ribbon, he noticed that the Ranger had scrawled a message to the young riders:
Lost Causes,
I am sorry that you’re awakening to betrayal. I never intended to double-cross you, nor to put you in harm’s way for the sake of my gain. I leave you this journal, my life’s record, so that you may learn from it and hopefully understand where I came from. I no longer need its reminders. An Enforcer’s past holds too much torment.
Take this money to the nearest town. Buy feed for the horses and proper gear. Then head home. Do not consider hunting me. You will only find more pain.
Be well and live on,
E. D.
Glancing again at the coins inside the bag, Keech was taken aback when he realized he was looking at a handful of silver dollars, the kind of coin he had only heard about in Pa’s study.
Duck and Quinn squeezed in to read the message.
“Home?” said Quinn. “We can’t go home. We ain’t got homes.”
Duck pointed to the journal. “There’s something on the next page.”
Keech flipped the page over. Scribbled at the bottom was a final note before the rest of the pages in the book fell blank:
My family will be whole again.
Keech looked at the note with a mixture of sorrow and frustration. His oceanside conversation with Doyle at Bonfire Crossing replayed in his mind. John needs his family whole again, Keech had said. His ma is gone. He needs to know his pa is with him.
You’re right, Doyle had answered. He does need his family whole again.
Keech slammed the journal shut and tossed it back into the bag. “We better round up Cutter and have a meeting.”
Quinn slipped on his forage cap. “I’ll fetch him.” He scurried off to the forest where Cutter had ridden off alone.
While they waited, Keech and Duck rounded up their gear. They didn’t speak, but Duck occasionally touched the place in her coat where her father’s pendant once hung. He remembered her words about the charm in Missouri—It’s a family heirloom. Our pa gave it to us a few days before he died—and he suddenly found himself battling fresh tears. Duck’s pony, Irving, and the clothes on her back were the only things she now carried from her old life in Sainte Genevieve. Doyle had stolen the last reminder of her family, all for the sake of some futile attempt to try to make his family whole again.
Duck glanced at him with a frown. “You’re crying.”
“Yeah.” Keech wiped his eyes angrily. “But things will get better. They have to.”
“I hope so,” she said.
Quinn returned a few moments later, his face looking sweaty and frantic. “Y’all better come take a look. I think Cut found some trouble.”
They sprinted to the woods, Quinn leading the way. They ran for a good spell through heavy thicket till Quinn stopped and pointed to a tall hickory tree. “Right there.”
Keech approached the tree slowly, keeping his eyes peeled to the ground. A stubby log sat on its side at the base of the hickory—the place where Cutter had apparently sat to rest. Dark red stains blotted the snow around it.
“Blood,” Duck said.
“Not too fresh, though. A few hours,” Quinn added.
“He’d been whittling on a plank of wood he found,” Keech pointed out. “Someone sneaked up and attacked him. There.”
A chaotic puddle of mud had been churned up beside the tree. Fresh snow had tumbled onto the forest hours ago, but Keech could still see the indentations of boot tracks leading up to the hickory. A jumble of footprints then stepped away to a neighboring tree, where Cutter had apparently tied off Chantico. From there, the mare’s hooves replaced boots and trotted off through the wilderness.
“Cutter’s been taken?” Quinn asked.
Duck shook her head. “Not a chance he’d get surprised like that.”
“I don’t think he was surprised at all.” Keech pointed to one of the clearer prints. “Look at the size of that boot.”
Quinn stooped. “Small. Like a kid.”
“It was Coward,” Keech said, suddenly recalling the small man’s fascination with Cutter in Friendly’s holding cell. “He sniffed his way to us.”
“I thought he was long gone with the Char Stone,” Duck said.
“I did, too. But you heard what Coward said back in Wisdom about how they still had ‘unfinished business.’ I tried to ask Cut about it, but he wouldn’t budge. He was scared to death of that fella.”
“All this blood.” Quinn pointed at the ground. “Looks like Cutter put up a mean fuss.”
Keech squinted at the clues. “This doesn’t make sense, though. Based on these tracks, it looks like the scuffle started after Coward walked up. That explains the blood and the mud. But here’s the strange part.” He stepped over to the disturbed snow leading to the place where Chantico had been tied off. “Over here it looks like Cutter and Coward walked side by side over to Chantico.”
Duck looked confused. “They rode out together?”
“If I’m reading the land right, looks that way.”
“He likely had a gun to Cutter’s head,” Quinn said.
“I can’t imagine any other reason,” Keech replied.
Duck glanced around the forest. “There must be more clues.” Her eyes locked on something beyond the hickory. Stepping over, she plucked a small timber of oak from the snow. It was the plank that Cutter had been carving on.
Brushing it off, Duck gave the board a somber look. She displayed it for them. Across the plank, Cutter’s knife had scratched out these words:
AMICUS FIDELIS PROTECTIO FORTIS
“‘A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter,’” Quinn quoted.
Silence fell over the trio as they looked at one another, letting Cutter’s final message permeate the space between them. Finally, Duck propped the plank on the log where Cutter had sat, then muttered, “I shouldn’t have called him a liar.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Quinn said.
“He was keeping secrets about my family, but he didn’t deserve this. We’ve got to find him.” Her stark blue eyes turned to Keech. “What do you reckon we do?”
Keech didn’t know how to respond. He had never wanted to be placed in a position of leadership. The wrong choices could cost them their lives. He dropped his head and closed his eyes, listening to the wind, hoping to hear the voice of Pa Abner in his mind. To his surprise, the strong voice that called out to him didn’t belong to Pa. It was the voice of Nat Embry, speaking the words he had given Keech and Duck just before his death in Wisdom.
Keep each other safe and never stop fighting.
A strange kind of warmth filled Keech to his bones, and he understood at once what they needed to do. He stepped closer to his friends, Duck Embry and Quinn Revels, his small but fierce team.
“The Lost Causes protect their own,” he said, pointing to the path left by Chantico’s departure. “I ain’t about to let the Reverend Rose take another of our band away. Let’s head back to the ponies. We got work to do.”
The young riders hurried back to the camp and mounted up. Seated high on Hector, Keech led the group away from the clearing, glancing behind him at the bending tree that had brought them back from Bonfire Crossing. The coastline and the ocean and the great fire seemed like trinkets he had taken from a wondrous dream. Like Pa Abner’s painting of the seashell, they would forever hang on the wall of Keech’s mind, echoing tales of the bright day when he had stood with friends and fought evil.
As the trio steered back onto the white prairie, the clouds parted, and the morning sun warmed them enough so they could unbutton their coats.
Duck scanned the rolling skies. “Without the shards, we can’t defend ourselves from crows or thralls or fish monsters. We’ll be wide open.”
“We do have a defense,” Quinn said. “Back at Bonfire, Keech destroyed that devil bird with his mind.” He glanced at Keech. “You can teach us that, right?”
Keech pondered for a second, nervous at the notion of being a teacher. He said, “Only if you teach us how to hide from the crows.”
Quinn chuckled. “I ain’t sure I’ve actually done that.”
Keech looked at both of his trailmates. “There’s a lot we can do. Doyle said we have a true gift for tapping the energies. I don’t know why, but we can do things. All of us. If we stick together and learn from one another, we’ll be okay.”
“But we don’t even know where to go next,” Duck said.
Keech gazed over the yawning sweep of prairie. A long wagon path stretched off to the west, twining through heavy grassland, and he knew he was seeing the great Santa Fe Trail. “We do know where to go.” He recalled the words of a brave Enforcer who had fallen in Wisdom. “It looks like Cutter’s taken the Santa Fe. We’ll follow him toward a place called Hook’s Fort.”
“The place Milos Horner wanted us to find,” Duck noted.
“Right. Once we get there, we’ll find the trapper McCarty, just like Horner said. He wanted us to find this person for a reason, so that’s what we’re gonna do.” Keech’s heart quickened at his own words. He ran his thumb over the initials etched into the leather of Hector’s saddle horn—MH—and felt the stirring of electricity in his veins.
He felt focused.
He turned back to Quinn. “We’ll track Cutter and Coward. And when we find them, we’ll find your aunt Ruth, too. I’d wager their paths are leading to the very same place. We’ll save her, Quinn. I swear it.”
Sudden tears brightened Quinn Revels’ eyes, then tumbled down his cheeks. “The Lost Causes protect their own.”
“That we do,” said Keech. “We also collect on the debts we’re owed. We mete out justice, and the Reverend’s in need of a heaping lot of it. We’ll find this House of the Rabbit the Osage elders mentioned and make good on that promise.”
“And what about Doyle?” Duck asked.
“Oh, we’ll be seeing him again,” Keech said. “He won’t stop till he gets the Char Stone back from Coward, so it’s only a matter of time before our paths reconnect. When we find him again, we’ll get the shards back, too. Pa Abner told us to unite the five, and that’s what we’re gonna do.”
“You know we can’t fight him,” Quinn said, wiping his eyes. “He’s too powerful.”
“Maybe we can’t, but we know his weakness, don’t we?”
“Eliza,” said Duck.
Keech smiled. “Pa used to say even the deadliest beast has soft skin near the heart. ‘Jab at the heart, put the beast on his knees.’”
The young riders snapped their reins, and the ponies picked up their pace. Soon Quinn began singing his curious Odyssey song, and his smooth voice rolled over the white plains of Kansas Territory like a breath of courage and strength:
“Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero
Who traveled far and wide
After he sacked the famous town of Troy.”
Settling Hector into a comfortable gait, Keech listened to Quinn’s song with a feeling of hope and led the Lost Causes toward the open frontier.