River Rocks: A West Virginia Adventure Novel

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River Rocks: A West Virginia Adventure Novel Page 14

by Steve Kittner


  Josh grinned and agreed as the two boys hurled their packs up onto the porch.

  BABOOM!!!

  Again the muzzleloader went off and the boys went around to the side to see what was going on. Burl Otis picked up a huge cottontail rabbit by the hind legs and held him up. A perfect head shot.

  “By the wood pile. Now we got something to put on the fire.”

  Josh and Eddie were impressed.

  Josh walked over and grabbed an armload of firewood as Otis handed Eddie his muzzleloader to carry inside.

  “I’m gonna go clean this hare out and then skin the cat. You boys go on inside and make yourself at home. We’ll have dinner in a bit,” he said.

  “Alright!” Eddie exclaimed, admiring the huge antique firearm.

  Josh and Eddie let themselves into Mr. Otis’ log home and Josh laid the firewood down on the large hearth in front of the fireplace. The inside of the cabin was as interesting as the outside. The inside walls of the cabin were log as well and were absolutely covered with antiques either collected or saved by the Otis family through the years. An old hand-cranked apple peeler, wash boards, jars, a wind up telephone, bamboo fly rods, old tools, old plates. It was a museum unto itself. On and on it went around the room with every log having something nailed to it that was old and representative of the Otis family. The boys studied it all and discussed what some of it was or what it did.

  After a few minutes, Burl Otis stepped inside carrying the freshly cleaned and well-washed rabbit. He noticed the boys admiring his collection of family heirlooms.

  “Ha. Looking at my junk, huh?” he said jokingly.

  “This is some cool stuff, Mr. Otis,” Josh replied.

  “Every bit of it is Otis family. It was all used at one time or another.”

  “Wow.”

  “Ya see these tools up here?” Burl Otis pointed to a double-ended bucksaw, some small hand tools used for stripping bark and shaving wood, an axe head minus the handle and a hand-cranked wood- boring drill.

  “Those were the only tools used to build this homestead back in the middle 1800s.” Burl looked at the tools with fondness, knowing that his great-great grandfather, Zeke Otis, settled this land and built this very home with only these tools and his bare hands.

  “Very cool,” Eddie said.

  “Yep.” He paused, looking around. “Well, let’s get this bunny on the fire, whatta ya say.”

  In just a few minutes Burl Otis had a nice fire going and their dinner skewered and roasting over the flame. Nighttime was beginning to settle in as the inside of the cabin took on a beautiful glow. Josh sat by the fire with his old Barlow knife, whittling away on a piece of oak about the size of a ruler. The three sat in silence as the fire crackled and popped and Mr. Otis would occasionally reach over and turn the spit, which held the rabbit over the fire. Lying close to the coals were three huge baking potatoes, grown right on the property, and slowly cooking and pulling in the flavors from the wood and smoke.

  Eddie and Burl were studying Josh’s craftsmanship as he methodically carved away at the chunk of hardwood. They would glance at each other and then back at Josh, each trying to figure out what he might be creating. The fire crackled and spit out a hot spark onto the limestone hearth in front of the fireplace. Eddie watched it burn out and then looked back at his friend.

  Eddie broke the silence after a while.

  “What’s that gonna be?” he asked, nodding at Josh’s’ carving job.

  Josh kept whittling, thought about it for a moment and looked up at Eddie.

  “My toothpick,” he said seriously.

  There was a brief pause and then an eruption of laughter in the room. Burl Otis was enjoying having some company for a change. Not too many folks came to visit the Otis family.

  “It’s good to have you guys up here,” he said, drying his eyes from laughing.

  The fire continued to pop and hiss as the sun continued to fall. Burl’s face got a little more serious.

  “So tell me boys, what brings you up Tater Holler looking for an old man like me?”

  The mood became more solemn.

  Josh and Eddie shifted their sitting positions so they would all be in a semi-circle around the fire. Josh glanced at Eddie and cleared his throat. He was a bit nervous and his shaky voice revealed it.

  “Mr. Otis. We came up here to talk to you about something we found that we believe is tied to you and your family from way back,” he started.

  There was a pause, as the firelight flickered off of Burl Otis’ weathered face. His head was pointed down at the floor, but his eyes were aiming right at Josh. “You found the red milk can,” he said in a low, whispering tone, grinning slightly.

  Something hissed in the fire as Josh looked him in the eye.

  “We found the can,” Josh said, equally as somber, nodding his head slightly.

  Burl Otis didn’t move from his position and went into thought for a moment.

  “I thought it was you boys,” he said, maintaining his whispering tones.

  “Whatta ya mean?” Eddie asked.

  Burl looked at them both.

  “At the sandbar. You boys were fishing. I was scouting for where to set traps that day where that creek dumps out into the river. Only I was on the other side of that stone trestle.”

  “It was you who I saw through the tunnel that day!” Josh exclaimed. “I knew I saw something. Remember, Eddie?”

  “Yeah…I remember. That was you, Mr. Otis?”

  “Most likely…Yep. I couldn’t believe my eyes. That old can has been missing for decades. I just knew it had to be the old red Franklin can. They say it used to sit on the Franklin porch up Red Creek all the time years and years ago. They lived along the creek, ya know? The Franklins didn’t know ‘til years later that the can held the deer hide. ‘Course no one knew ‘til years later. It was just porch decoration; lotta people have ‘em. But… Clyde left a note in his bible about the can. The bible was lost and wasn’t found again ‘til 1958! The note told of the clues and such…”

  Josh and Eddie were wide-eyed and trying to absorb all that he was saying.

  Josh asked, “But if the Franklins found a note, how did everyone else find out about the red can? Seems like they would have kept it a secret.”

  “That’s true, but the Franklins didn’t find it. Of all people, a newspaper man found the bible with the note still in it.”

  “Oh, brother,” Eddie said. “And how did a news guy find it?”

  “Clyde’s bible was found in a used book store and bought by a man named John Hopes, a young writer for the Charleston Gazette. And Hopes, being a writer for a newspaper, did what he did best. He wrote a front page article about everything he could pull out of the notes he found. A bunch of information and clues about the legend. And of course, again being a writer, he took a little artistic liberty and embellished whatever he wanted to hype the story even more. And that spilled the beans to everyone who knew anything about the legend. It also incriminated Clyde Franklin, but he was dead already so it didn’t matter.

  “What bad luck for the Franklins,” Josh said.

  “Yeah, but good luck for the rest of us!” Burl said.

  Josh looked puzzled as he thought.

  He said, “But what happened to the can? How did it end up down at the trestle buried in the mud?”

  Burl Otis grinned as he looked at him.

  “The Great Flash Flood of 1936. It was devastating. The story goes that there was some kind of weather system that moved in and hung around upstream around Hillsburg. It rained for days and the ground soaked up what it could but once it started running off the hills, the creek rose so fast people couldn’t do anything but run uphill. It was coming up six or seven feet an hour. They left their homes and belongings and just ran right up the mountains. It washed away over twenty houses and left behind nothing but devastation, and it took the red can with it, and it hasn’t been seen since.”

  Josh and Eddie were amazed.

  �
��So then everyone found out in 1958 after the bible was discovered that they needed the red can with the deer-hide? After it had sat there on that porch of the Franklins for so long?” Eddie asked.

  “That’s right.” Burl grinned slightly.

  Burl paused as the firelight flickered in his dark eyes.

  “So I watched you boys from a distance tryin’ to pry the lid off of the can and I could hardly stand it. All that history was coming back to me and all the stories told to me by my family about the legend. Man, I was going nuts.” He smiled.

  “Why didn’t you come over and help us?” Eddie asked.

  “Well, think about it. A big old burly mountain man like myself running from the trestle tunnel over to you, going on about gold and legends and murder. Woulda’ been a little aggressive, huh?”

  “I guess so, yeah,” Eddie replied.

  “And, too, I don’t let people see me much. I’d rather see than be seen. It’s kind of a family tradition, ya know.”

  He looked down and then back up at the boys. Eddie got the quick impression that it was a phobia that Burl Otis was not really proud of. Social insecurity.

  “So I watched you guys. I watched you pull and twist on it and I was hopin’ you’d just give up and leave it there.”

  Josh shook his head from side to side and grinned a bit.

  “So then you got smart and used leverage. That was good thinkin’ by the way. And then…when I saw the deer-hide…let me tell ya, my heart was poundin’.”

  Josh thought for a moment, recalling the events and replaying them in his mind. He grinned and looked back up at Mr. Otis.

  “You threw the rock at the garage, didn’t you?” Josh asked.

  Burl Otis looked at the boys and then looked down at the floor and wobbled his head around like a young boy who had just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  “Yeah…I was,…what I wanted to do by then was flush you guys outta there and go in and grab the deer-hide…just to see it. I wasn’t going to take it with me.” He paused. “But ya didn’t come outta there. Not very far anyway.”

  Josh thought. “Where were you when you threw it?”

  “By the riverbank,” he replied.

  The boys looked at him with astonishment.

  Eddie said. “Good arm!”

  They all enjoyed another laugh.

  Josh thought again. “Behind the tree! You were behind that tree.”

  Burl nodded his head.

  “I knew I saw something again there, too. I was blaming Radcliffe.” He looked at Eddie.

  “That’s right.”

  Burl Otis reached over and cranked the big hare a quarter of a turn and brushed on a sauce made from apple jelly and various seasonings that smelled of pumpkin pie spices. They sat in silence for a moment, once again listening to the fire pop, while the flames flickered off of the dim walls of the cabin, each person staring into the fire as Josh resumed his whittling.

  After a minute, Josh said, “Mr. Otis…can you tell us about the legend? Will you tell us the story?”

  Burl Otis pulled a deep breath in through his nose, never taking his eyes off the fire. The flames danced in his eyes and the light of the fire gave his face a mix of shadows and a warm, red glow, as he slowly exhaled. There were no lights or candles or lamps to light the room only the flickering fire to see by. Burl went into deep thought, he slowly nodded his head and then began the story of the Legend of the Southern Jewel.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  He stared into the fire and spoke very deliberately as he thought and recalled the legend.

  “The year,… was 1903. My Great-grandfather, Arthur Otis,…he was a good man, but sometimes an ornery man. A mountain man, like me. Most people were afraid of him because he came across as being a bit mean or aggressive. Kids especially didn’t like him. They thought he was a wild man or a caveman or something. Anyway, he was bellied up to the bar at the Cross Roads Tavern one night, with a guy named Franklin. Clyde Franklin. They really had nothing in common other than the whiskey they were drinkin’ but the more they drank, the more they talked and Franklin had some real interesting things to say, apparently.”

  “What were they talkin’ about?” Josh asked quietly.

  Burl Otis turned the rabbit another quarter turn and then took a long drink of cold well water from a metal cup.

  “Ya got to remember that everything I tell ya is according to the legend, OK? It could or couldn’t be fact but this story has been told through the years. There were some witnesses to these conversations back then but they went unnamed. But according to the legend, they were talking about hard times… and gold.” He paused. “A dangerous combination. Hard times make people do desperate things.”

  Clyde Franklin worked in the railroad yard way up at the head of Red Creek. He knew ‘most everybody in town and drank with a lot of them after work occasionally. Ya see, all these railroad guys would go wash down all that coal dust with beer after their shifts. Laborers and management, it didn’t matter. They drank in the same bar and the bar owner would run tabs for these miners that they could pay on payday. Well, it started getting harder and harder for these guys to pay because of a reduction in hours up at the mine. That was the first sign of hard times back then; when you couldn’t pay your bar bill.” He grinned slightly. “So anyway, somehow Franklin got wind of a gold shipment that was going to be passing through Red Creek on the C&O. Not just any gold shipment, but a huge pile of old Confederate gold. The stuff that came from foreign countries to fund the South during The War. It was on its way to a museum or something over in D.C. for a temporary show.”

  “Clyde Franklin thought he could get away with stealing something that high profile?” Josh asked eagerly.

  “He didn’t think he could. He was sure he could. He did get away with it. But here’s the thing; he couldn’t have cared less about the value of it. He didn’t want it for the money. No... Clyde Franklin was an old Confederate soldier. He just wanted the gold out of Union hands. He felt it was stolen and he wanted to steal it back. He was an old man, bitter over the outcome of the war. He called it The War of Northern Aggression. That war had a lot of names, and West Virginia was quite divided on it, too. We were technically a northern state but there were a lot of men who went down to Richmond to fight for the South. Clyde Franklin was one of them.”

  Josh and Eddie both sat back in their chairs as Eddie raised his eyebrows and let out a deep breath. “Wow.”

  “So he and my great-grandfather sat at the bar that night, and the more they drank the bigger the plan got. The bigger the plan got, the more they drank and by the end of the night, they were best friends, or so Great-grand dad thought.

  “Whatta ya mean?” Josh asked.

  Otis put his palm up. “I’ll get to it.”

  Josh and Eddie exchanged glances.

  “Over the next few weeks Clyde managed to find out what day and what train that gold shipment was going to be shipped on. He knew the security guards would be on the train and how many of them there would be.” Burl paused and looked up at the wall, collecting his next thought. He went on, “Now…Clyde also had access to railroad supplies, including dynamite and an official signal lantern. It went out right under his coat one evening and was never missed from the yard until after the robbery. During inventory the following weeks, those things were discovered missing from company stores, but it was too late then.”

  Burl Otis’ voice was still low and whispering, as if there may be someone outside his window trying to listen in. The fire began to dwindle a bit, so he reached for the poker to stir up the coals before adding another log. He brushed their dinner again and flipped the potatoes over.

  He continued. “That’s how they would have stopped the train, ya know…with just a signal lantern. That’s the legend, anyway. The missing lantern was never found, but in those days that’s the only means they had to signal trains to stop at night. Wave the signal lantern. They wouldn’t stop otherwise.”

 
“Well… how do you know about all this and the law never did?” Eddie asked.

  Otis grinned just a little. “Loose lips sink ships.”

  Josh and Eddie looked at him funny.

  “It’s an old saying. After the hold up, Franklin hid the gold and just kept enough to live on. He most likely had a guy in Charleston who would buy it and melt it down for a very good price. Franklin could live very well on that. He would go to the Cross Roads and drink the night away and the more he drank the more he talked. Loose lips. He would tell just enough to make people wonder. He would tell one guy that he knew how the robbers stopped the train. And then he would tell another guy, a few nights later, how the robbers managed to kill all five men on the train. Then he would tell another guy something else until people started putting things together and wondering about him and his involvement in the train heist. He quit the railroad job, too, and folks wondered how he had the means to survive with no income. Also, he had no trouble paying his bar tab.” Burl was leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, still speaking low and whispering.

  “But the law never knew, really. Or they didn’t know enough to arrest him. Oh, they say he was questioned a few times but without any hard evidence all he had to do was deny it, right? They had to have some kind of evidence, ya know. Proof. There was no smoking gun. The only thing that was left behind at the scene, one single clue, was…” he paused, thought a minute and got up, and walked over to a tall, narrow oak cabinet that held six very old-looking guns. He reached to the bottom of the cabinet, moved one of the gun stocks over just a little and pulled out an old, very worn, leather wallet. He walked back over and sat down by the fire with the boys.

  “This. This is the only piece of evidence that was ever found at the scene of the train robbery in 1903.”

  “Arthur Otis’ wallet!” Josh said softly. “We read about this at the library. Oh my gosh…it’s like a piece of history.”

  Burl handed the old wallet to Josh. Josh handled it and looked at it as if it were the gold itself. He opened it up and, stamped on the inside was the name “ART OTIS” in letters about a half-inch tall and all capitals. Eddie scooted closer to get a better look. Josh looked at Burl as if to get approval to inspect further. Burl Otis gave him a nod and a swish of his hand, as if to say go ahead.

 

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