Sam took another bite of his Snickers bar and chewed slowly, unable to take his eyes from the view outside the helicopter window.
For the past few hours, he’d been watching the flat, dry, dusty landscape of Nevada sort of crumple and heave itself upward, first into gentle green hills, then into taller slopes. After a stop to refuel, they had finally reached Montana, where towering peaks stabbed up through pine forests into a sky that was so blue it practically glowed.
Sam had never seen mountains this big before. This steep. This . . . this . . . mountainy. The sheer size of it all was making his brain reel. He could almost hear a soundtrack playing in the distance: “O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. For purple mountain majesties . . .”
And to make things even better, nobody was trying to kill him or any of his friends. Right this minute, anyway. Lately Sam had learned not to take that kind of thing for granted.
The person sitting next to Sam poked him with a finger. Sam turned to glance at Martina—Marty—Wright. Her eyes were lit up with excitement behind her glasses, and her black hair, chopped off at the level of her chin in a line so straight you could use it for a ruler, swung beneath her headset. Under a fleece jacket she wore a purple T-shirt that said THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE WALKED INTO A BAR. IT WAS TENSE.
“Did you know that Glacier National Park was the tenth national park to be established?” Marty asked. She was speaking into the headset; Sam wore a similar one. The noise from the helicopter rotors was so loud that without the headsets on you couldn’t hear a word anybody said.
“Nope,” Sam said. He didn’t add that he didn’t care much either. Marty knew a lot of stuff, and she liked to share it. Sometimes it could be irritating, but there had been times in the past few days when the things Marty knew had saved Sam’s life.
Still, that didn’t mean he had to listen to her twenty-four/seven, did it?
“And did you know—” she started to say.
“So, listen,” he interrupted her. “What do you think we’re going to be looking for when we land? Got any ideas about what our old pal Ben Franklin would have wanted us to find in Montana?”
“Do tell us some more about Glacier National Park, Ms. Wright,” cut in a cool voice, one that belonged to Evangeline Temple. She was seated across from Marty, and when Sam glanced at her, she skewered him with her gaze and nodded toward the helicopter pilot. Obviously she wanted Sam to stop talking into his headset when the guy could hear.
“Well, it has one of the largest remaining grizzly bear populations in the lower forty-eight states,” Marty said with enthusiasm. “Did you know that some scientists consider polar bears to be a subspecies of grizzly bears? And how about this . . .”
Sam scratched behind his left ear, and while his hand was up there, pressed the button that turned his headset from on to off. Marty’s voice went silent, although her mouth kept moving. Sam smiled and nodded, wide-eyed and eager, which seemed to make Marty happy. She kept on moving her mouth as Sam turned his face back to the window.
This time, however, he focused his gaze not on the landscape whizzing past, but on the faint reflection he could see of Evangeline and the person next to her.
Tall and slim, her dark hair streaked with white and very smooth under her headset, Evangeline seemed to be listening to Marty, but it was hard to tell. For all Sam knew, she’d switched off her headset just as he had, and she was busy daydreaming about Betsy Ross singing a karaoke version of “Yankee Doodle” with some steel drums for backup.
Next to her, Theo—Theodore Washington—slouched in a seat that looked too small for him. But everything looked too small for Theo. He made the whole helicopter seem like something from a kid’s G.I. Joe collection.
Theo was staring out of the window just as Sam had been, without a word to say. That wasn’t unusual. Sam had known Theo only a few days, and the one thing he knew for sure about the big guy was that Theo didn’t speak up unless it was to say something that mattered.
As Sam watched, Theo frowned, and his fingers began to tap out a restless rhythm on the armrest of his seat. And for some reason that Sam couldn’t quite put his finger on, Theo didn’t look like a guy who was staying quiet because he didn’t have anything to say. Instead he looked like a guy who had plenty to say but wasn’t saying any of it.
Weird. But then everything had been weird for days now, when it hadn’t been terrifying, astonishing, or just plain impossible to believe.
And life didn’t show signs of getting back to normal anytime soon.
Sam kept watching the two faces, Evangeline’s pale ivory and Theo’s dark brown, both superimposed on a rushing landscape of conifers and rocky peaks and cloud-swept sky. He really wished he knew a bit more about the things Theo wasn’t saying. Evangeline too. The pair of them had not always been exactly up front about what they knew and what they were planning.
In fact, there were times when they had straight-out lied.
Evangeline had pretended to be running a puzzle contest, the kind of thing Sam loved to enter. The American Dream contest. Sam had been so excited when he’d gotten that letter in the silver envelope, the one that said he’d won. His prize? The trip of a lifetime.
Well, Evangeline sure hadn’t lied about that part.
What she hadn’t told him—not at first, anyway—was that this trip of a lifetime would involve a crazy trek across the entire country, trying to find seven artifacts hidden in seven secret locations. Those artifacts were the key to finding some bizarre super-weapon from way back in Revolutionary War times, something Ben Franklin himself had invented. That’s what Evangeline claimed, anyway.
Sam dug around in his pockets and fished out a crumpled receipt and a chewed-up ballpoint pen. He smoothed the receipt on his knee and wrote, Any idea what kind of weapon Ben F. would dream up? Death ray? Nuclear bomb? Photon torpedo?
He passed the note to Marty. She looked down at it and frowned, shook her head, snatched the pen from his hand, and wrote until she ran out of receipt.
She handed the note back. Really, Sam? Nobody in Revolutionary Days even knew what an atom was. How could Ben Franklin come up with—
Marty found a little notebook in the inside pocket of her jacket. She flipped it open and finished what she had been writing.
—a nuclear weapon?
Sam took the notebook from her and wrote. So no bomb. What else could it be? Ideas?
Insufficient data, Marty wrote back. For now we have to concentrate on finding the next artifact.
Sam opened Marty’s notebook to a new page. Quickly, he drew a sketch of the picture that had sent them to Montana—a mountain, a goat, a black foot, and a guy with a flat head. It had been Marty who had figured out what the images meant; she was nearly as good at puzzles as Sam was. Nearly.
The mountain and the goat together meant the Rockies, and the body parts stood for the Blackfoot and the Flathead, Native American tribes who lived near Glacier National Park. If Marty was right, and if they were very, very lucky, they should be able to find their second artifact somewhere inside that park.
The things had been hidden—way too well, as far as Sam was concerned—by a secret society called the Founders, descendants of the Founding Fathers themselves. There were two of them right here in this helicopter—Evangeline, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, and Theo, the several-times great-nephew of George Washington.
The Founders had stashed the artifacts, and then they’d filled their hiding places with puzzles and traps, making sure that only the right people would get their hands on stuff like the key that Benjamin Franklin had flown from his famous kite. The key that, yesterday, Sam had actually held in his hand.
And Evangeline and Theo had not mentioned any of this. Not right away, at least. Sure, they’d come clean now—after everything that had happened in Death Valley, where Sam and Marty and Theo had fallen down flooded mine shafts and solved deadly underground puzzles and nearly been electrocuted—Marty had actually been electrocuted!—and escaped scary guys with guns.
But did that mean, Sam wondered, that Evangeline and Theo had told him and Marty about everything? Or did those two have more surprises in store?
Sam shook his head, shoved the notebook back at Marty, lifted the last of his Snickers bar to his mouth, and felt his teeth close on paper. He’d eaten the whole thing, barely tasting it. What a waste. He licked a smear of chocolate off the wrapper just as the helicopter tilted, and his stomach squeezed itself up against the back of his throat. The ground outside his window swooped closer. They were coming in for a landing.
Marty put the notebook back in her pocket, and then she reached toward Sam’s head and pressed his headset’s on button. “So, like I was saying”—she zapped a pointed look in his direction—“Lewis and Clark wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without Sacagawea. And all she gets is one dinky little dollar coin that won’t even go in most vending machines. Totally unfair. And—”
“We’ll be hitting the ground in Whitefish in about ten minutes or so,” crackled the pilot’s voice, cutting off Marty midsentence. He’d probably figured out that waiting for Marty to be done talking was like waiting for the sun to be done shining. It would happen eventually, but could you really hold out for several billion years?
Sam listened to Marty’s fifty most fascinating facts about the Lewis and Clark Expedition while the helicopter got lower and lower, finally touching down on a landing strip. Sam was the first one out the door.
It wasn’t much of an airport, he thought as he jumped down to the tarmac. A couple of little planes and choppers like theirs were scattered here and there, and one low building was in the distance. He drew in a deep breath of the fresh, cool air and shivered a little. Quite a difference from the blazing heat of Death Valley, where he had woken up this morning.
But it wasn’t just the chill in the breeze that made that little hint of uneasiness creep up Sam’s spine. One of the many things that Evangeline and Theo had failed to mention early on was that the four of them weren’t the only ones trying to get their hands on the Founders’ artifacts. They had competition in this race. The other team was headed up by a scary guy named Flintlock, who worked for a man called Gideon Arnold.
Sam remembered Arnold’s pale, almost colorless eyes, and the icy way they had looked at Sam and his friends over the barrel of a gun. The guy knew how to hold a grudge, that was for sure. He was still furious about what had happened to his who-knew-how-many-times-great-grandfather, Benedict Arnold himself. America’s most infamous traitor. And, more important, Gideon Arnold was ready to kill anybody who got between him and the Founders’ artifacts.
Could Arnold be here right now? Watching them? Sam brooded about that while the four of them hauled their suitcases through the airport and Evangeline waved a hand at a taxi waiting by the curb. Could some of Arnold’s spies be hanging around in baggage claim? Could the taxi driver be in Arnold’s pay? It wasn’t impossible. One thing Sam had learned on his little jaunt through Death Valley was not to ever, under any circumstances, underestimate Gideon Arnold.
The taxi swept them along a highway and into the little town of Whitefish. They rolled over a bridge with a shallow river flowing underneath and piled out of the cab when their driver announced that they had made it downtown.
It didn’t look like much of a downtown to Sam. No skyscrapers, maybe two traffic lights, about a dozen wooden storefronts lining either side of the street. One sign declared that its building was the WILD, WILDER, WILDEST WEST SALOON!!! With three exclamation marks. Sam counted them. Next door was a store with a wide window full of ten-gallon hats and intricately tooled cowboy boots.
Evangeline paid the cabbie (who didn’t seem to be an agent of Gideon Arnold’s after all) and asked him where they could find a good outdoor supply store. “We will need to do some shopping,” she said as the driver took off. She pointed up the street. Marty headed in that direction, in front of Sam. Evangeline and Theo trailed behind.
“Just look at those mountains,” Marty gushed, pointing to the view at the end of the street. She tipped her face up to appreciate the snow-covered slabs of rock, glowing in the amber light of early afternoon. “Quite a change from the desert, right, Sam? Sam?”
“Uh-huh,” Sam grunted. Marty was staring around like a tourist, and Evangeline and Theo were muttering together, so it looked like it was up to Sam to keep an eye out for the bad guys. Trouble was, he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. It wasn’t like Arnold’s employees wore little name tags announcing, “Hi! My name is Bob, and I work for a homicidal maniac!”
Anyway, every other person in this little town seemed somehow out of place to Sam’s eyes. It was because most of the people walking by were tourists, he realized. They wore hiking boots and fleece jackets and multipocketed fishermen’s vests, and they were consulting maps or guidebooks or looking around like Marty, marveling at the scenery.
Sam followed Marty down the sidewalk, passing a drugstore, a gallery full of Native American artifacts, places advertising helicopter tours and white-water rafting, and a bakery selling cinnamon buns that smelled so good Sam nearly forgot he was supposed to be watching out for sinister henchmen.
“We have to—” Sam heard Theo say from behind him, but he didn’t finish the sentence.
“We have to go where the clues take us,” Evangeline answered, her low voice full of meaning. “No matter how hard it is.”
Bang!
Without a second thought, Sam threw himself at Marty, dragging her down behind a car parked by the curb. Heart pounding, he craned his neck, trying to see around a muddy tire to where the gunshots were coming from.
“Sam! Would you get off me now?” Marty said from underneath him. “Ow!”
“Mr. Solomon?” Evangeline’s startled voice came from above.
Sam lifted his head. Theo gave him a funny look. Everybody seemed to be giving him funny looks. Tourists had stopped to stare and a little kid in a stroller was giggling madly.
Bang!
Somebody on the far side of the street was laughing—a guy right in front of the Wild, Wilder, Wildest West Saloon, decked out in a cowboy suit complete with a bright-blue hat and boots the size of Texas.
“Sorry I startled you there, pardner!” the guy called out, letting off another burst of explosions from his cap pistol. “Show starts in ten minutes, folks! Don’t be late, it’ll be great! Right here in the wildest saloon this side of the Mississippi!”
Kids around him shouted and jumped in excitement. One boy in a black T-shirt with a pirate’s skull on the back doubled over with laughter, pointing at Sam and Marty.
Sam felt his face heating up. He struggled to get off Marty without squashing her further. She helped by shoving him to one side and getting up herself, while the stupid fake cowboy waved and hooted and ushered a group of tourists into the saloon.
“You’re not hurt, Ms. Wright?” Evangeline brushed a bit of sidewalk grit off Marty’s jacket while Theo, straight-faced, offered Sam a hand up.
“I’m fine,” Marty said, settling her glasses back on her nose. “But Sam—that was a total overreaction. Do we need to get you checked out for post-traumatic stress disorder or something?”
“Give it a rest, Marty,” Sam muttered as they kept walking down the sidewalk, with Evangeline and Theo in front this time.
She put a hand on his arm. “Sam? Really. You’re okay, right?” she asked, too softly for the other two to hear.
Sam gave her a sideways look. “Just a case of terminal embarrassment,” he told her, keeping his tone light, and glad that Marty had no way of guessing how painfully his heart was still hammering inside his rib cage. He sought for a way to change the subject and found one. “Where do you think we’ll find the next clue?”
“It could be anywhere.” Marty looked around and shook her head. “Well, not anywhere, I suppose. The artifacts were all moved to their present locations around the time of the Civil War, remember?”
“I remember, yeah,” Sam answered.
“So maybe we could go to the library and get a map of the town from that era. That could give us some idea of where to start. Or the town historical society, that might be good. Once we dig up some information, we’ll—”
“Information, huh?” Sam asked, pointing to a building just ahead. “That looks like a good place to get information. Hey, Theo, Evangeline, how about we take a look in here?”
A sign on the building read GLACIER NATIONAL PARK INFORMATION CENTER. Sam led the way inside. The minute they were through the door, Marty darted away from Sam’s side.
“Ooh, guidebooks!” she exclaimed. “And topographical maps!”
Theo and Evangeline moved off into the information center as well. Sam hesitated just inside the door, looking over shelves of protein bars and water bottles and compasses and first-aid kits and lots and lots of books. Hiking guides. Fly-fishing guides. Wildlife guides. Wildflower guides.
Information . . . right. This place was full of information. But what kind did they need, exactly?
Restless, he wandered over to a spinner rack of postcards and gave it a whirl. He picked out a nice one of mountain peaks against a blue sky to send to his parents. His mom and dad still thought he was on the American Dream tour, visiting major historical sites and solving some puzzles along the way. He’d send them a postcard in a day or two, but there was no way he could tell them what was really going on.
Beside the postcards was a whiteboard with Weather Report scrawled across the top. Below was written “Today: sun and clouds. Tomorrow: sun, turning cloudy in the afternoon. Tomorrow night: heavy rains expected. FLASH FLOOD WARNING!!!!”
Great, Sam thought. Flash floods, Gideon Arnold, and Marty with a new guidebook. Which would be more deadly?
He dropped the postcard into the pocket of his sweatshirt. A weather report was not the kind of information they needed right now. He caught sight of Theo across the store, standing with Evangeline in front of a map that reached from floor to ceiling. Well, that seemed like a good place to start.
“Any clues?” he asked Theo when he reached his side.
Theo shrugged. “It’s a lot of terrain to cover,” he said. “Especially if we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for. What we need is a place to start.”
Sam looked at the map. He took a step back and tipped his head up and looked at it some more. “How big is this park anyway?” he asked.
“Over a million acres,” Marty’s voice answered. She’d come up behind him, still holding a new guidebook with a finger marking her place, a bunch of brochures in her other hand.
Sam sighed. “So we think there’s a clue hidden somewhere in a million acres of park land?”
“Perhaps here, perhaps elsewhere,” Evangeline said. “If you and Ms. Wright will take a look, I will see if the rangers can tell us anything.” She set off across the store, headed for a pair of rangers in olive-green uniforms. Theo trailed behind her.
“Come on, Sam. Focus.” Marty settled her glasses on her nose and leaned forward. “Do you see anything that might be a clue?”
Sam shrugged. “How about that?” he asked, pointing. “Lost Lake. Because I sure am lost.”
“Get serious. Oh! Goat Haunt Overlook!”
“What? Goat Haunt? Why would we want to be visited by the spirits of dead goats?”
“The drawing inside Benjamin Franklin’s key!” Marty looked around and lowered her voice. She tapped the pocket that held her little notebook and shot Sam a meaningful look. “Remember? The picture of a goat? Maybe that’s the clue.”
“There was other stuff in that drawing too,” Sam said. “Is there anything here that looks like a foot or a head?” Usually arguing with Marty helped him think. But this time, his brain remained stubbornly blank. “Look, there’s the Flathead National Forest.”
“But that’s not in the actual park.”
“Do you think Ben Franklin knew the boundaries of the actual park? Did it even exist back then?”
“Fine. But see, there’s a Goat Lick Overlook too.”
“Will you stop blabbering on about goats?” Sam snapped.
“Will you stop being so negative?” Marty snapped back.
“Can I help you two?” someone asked from behind them. Sam turned to see a plump, smiling woman in a ranger’s uniform. “Are you looking for a place to hike or fish? Anything I can recommend?”
“Uh, no thanks,” Sam mumbled, and he pulled Marty a few feet away. “I’m not being negative,” he told her in a low voice as the ranger turned to point out a good fishing lake to a man in a baseball cap. “There’s just no way a giant map is going to help. We can’t search every spot in this park that mentions a goat or a foot or a—”
“Caractacus!” Marty exclaimed.
Sam frowned. “Isn’t that some sort of eye disease?”
Marty looked at him coldly. “Seriously? No—it’s a place!” She seized Sam’s arm and dragged him over to a rack of brochures. “I saw it before, only I didn’t realize . . . There!” She seized the shiny slip of paper and waved it in Sam’s face. “Theo! Evangeline! Come and look at this! Caractacus Ranch!”
Sam caught a glimpse of several horses on the front of the brochure, along with a grinning family of tourists all wearing cowboy hats. “A ranch? Marty, this isn’t a Wild West show. What does a ranch have to do with anything?”
“Caractacus was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite horse!” Marty said loudly. Startled tourists glanced at her over the shelves of books and camping supplies. She turned down the volume but kept waving the brochure at Sam, nearly swatting him in the nose, as Theo and Evangeline reached them. “It’s a clue. I’m sure it’s a clue. Benjamin Franklin must have sent us to find Thomas Jefferson’s artifact!”
“Because of a horse’s name?” Sam took the brochure to stop Marty from whacking him in the face with it. “That’s a little . . . thin, don’t you think? I mean, for all we know George Washington had a dog named, I don’t know, Spot.”
“He didn’t,” Theo put in, and plucked the brochure from Sam’s hand to frown at it.
Sam rolled his eyes. “I’m just saying, pet names? That’s what we’re chasing after now?”
“It’s a better clue than ‘Lost Lake,’” said Marty frostily. “But fine. Go ahead. Find something better.”
“By all means.” Evangeline, in her turn, took the brochure from Theo. “If you find something else, Mr. Solomon, we will have two avenues to pursue. And if not, we will try Ms. Wright’s idea.”
Sam could not find anything better. He did try. But after flipping through books and brochures and guides and even coming back to stare at the big map until his eyeballs ached, he could not find anything that even resembled the ghost of a hint of a clue.
“Caractacus Ranch it is,” Evangeline said. “I hope they have four rooms available.”
“I hope they don’t expect me to ride a horse,” Sam replied. “Or—”
He broke off as a pack of kids burst into the room from the sidewalk outside. One of them was wearing a black T-shirt and waving a gun. Sam jerked back as the kid pointed the pistol right at his chest.
“Bang!” the boy shouted, and pulled the trigger. Water squirted out of the black plastic gun and splattered the front of Sam’s sweatshirt. Sam flinched. His elbow knocked over a display of bright silver whistles.
The kid doubled over in laughter. Theo scowled at him. He didn’t move; he didn’t have to. Theo could look extremely ominous just standing still.
The boy stopped laughing and fled back outside, followed by his friends. Sam could see the pirate skull on the back of his T-shirt.
Theo picked up the display, setting it upright with a jerk and scattering whistles all over the floor. “Get a grip, Sam,” he said. “We’ve still got supplies to pick up. We can’t just hang around here all day.”
“Yeah, okay, thanks for—” Sam started to say, but Theo was already walking toward the door, hands in his pockets, head down, so that Sam suddenly found himself talking to the big guy’s back.
“What’s his problem?” Sam asked, brushing water off his sweatshirt. Marty shook her head. Evangeline looked thoughtful. All three of them followed Theo out the door. Then Sam had to hurry back inside to pay for his postcard.