BANDITS OF THE TRACE

by Albert E. Cowdrey

I didn’t see the first issue, which was unfortunate, because I was just about the right age to get interested. As far as I can remember, my introduction to F&SF—anyway, my in-depth introduction—came about this way. In the summer of ‘64 I joined a house party in upstate NY to escape the intolerable New Orleans heat. I had friends in the Village, stopped off to carouse a bit, arrived late to the party and found that every bed in the farmhouse had been taken. I received temporary quarters in the barn, which was already inhabited by several thousand chipmunks. If they’d only slept there I wouldn’t have minded, but the little devils had built a freeway under my bed and did a lot of commuting. So sleep was out, but there was a light in the barn, and in an old cupboard, voilà! I discovered a linear yard or so of dusty F&Ss. I got in some good reading that night, also the one following. When I was upgraded to a bed in the farmhouse, I took them with me (the magazines, not the chippies) and finished almost every story in such time as eating, swimming, badminton, boozing, and fooling around permitted. I bet very few of your other contributors have been introduced to F&SF by members of the Order Rodentia!—Albert Cowdrey

She’d guarded it long and guarded it well. She’d lived in darkness until she turned white, all of her. She’d watched the bleaching happen, slowly, back before her eyes went opaque and before new layers of soil closed off the last dim trickle of light.

Never mind. She had other ways of being aware.

She depended on burrowing creatures like rats and moles, first to let a little air in—enough for her, because she breathed so slowly—then to supply her food—not much, but enough. After rains, water seeped through the crumbling brickwork, so she could drink. What more did she need?

Professor Kendall Keyes sat at his desk staring at a page from the first (and so far only) chapter of his forever forthcoming history of frontier life in the South.

God, how frustrating. The treasure was lying right in front of him, but he couldn’t crack the code, not even with the aid of a Gideon Bible he’d snitched from a bedside table in the Beau Rivage casino, on his last gambling jaunt to Biloxi. Yet the code had to be simple—an invention of two farm girls living in the backwoods….

And how about his other clue to the mystery? He glowered at a pile of five lead plates, discolored by time, each one an inch thick and a foot square, each with a single word gouged into it, probably by a steel chisel. Ten bucks apiece at Tom’s Trash & Treasures, and for what? Unless he could find out where they came from, the plates were useless too.

“She-it,” he said.

He spun his squealing swivel chair to face the window and glared at the campus of Central Mississippi State College—the red-brick classroom buildings and labs, the galleried residence halls, the cushioned lawns and twining paths. Students sat on the long, low branches of the live oaks, munching sandwiches or poring over books or fiddling with iPods and Blackberries and Christ-knew-whats. The tall pines of Reservoir Park provided a green backing; a sign on a distant water tower hailed Bonaparte, Mississippi: A Great Place to Live!

A great place to rot, thought Keyes sourly. How could he have drifted into a life that was so unworthy of him? He spun the chair back and pulled a half-worked Times crossword from the middle drawer of his desk. If the choice was between writing his book and working a puzzle, he’d work the puzzle. Though he wasn’t making much progress there, either. Uncompleted words left the crossword looking like Swiss cheese, only with square holes. He was glaring at it when somebody began tapping on his door—probably a damn student.

“Entrez-vous,” he said, hoping the knocker would think he’d got the professor of French by mistake, and move on. Instead, the door opened about a foot and Houdini’s bearded face inserted itself into the aperture.

“Well, Mr. Marx,” Keyes said. “What a surprise.”

Bernard Marx had won his nickname as the Famous Disappearing Student, signing up for dozens of courses, sitting in on one or two lectures, then dropping out. Watching him sidle in—skinny, randomly attired, tripping over the untied laces of his Reeboks—Keyes thought he knew what he’d come for.

“I suppose you want an Incomplete,” he said hopefully. One less blue book to read, come exam time.

“Nuh-uh. Actually, I’m enjoying your class.”

“You are?”

“Yeah. I like all that frontier stuff. Men were men in those days. What I’d like is some extra reading. I’ve read all the stuff on the bibliography and it’s okay, but…. Hey. Is that the Times Sunday crossword?”

For a moment Keyes just sat there, struck dumb by the notion of a student who’d not only completed the readings two weeks into the term, but wanted more. Meantime Houdini approached his desk, peering through expensive-looking rimless glasses that enlarged his eyes to the semblance of baroque goldfish.

“Maybe you’re not gonna finish that?” he queried hopefully. “My Times didn’t come this week, and I really, really need my puzzle fix.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Keyes, regaining his voice, “I am.” Then added, with reluctance, “If I can just get the damn theme. Something to do with Wayne Somebody or Somebody Wayne. I don’t think it’s that old movie, Wayne’s World, it’s something else. For instance, this clue says Wayne’s town? Six letters, starts with G. I’ve been thinking of John Wayne and western towns, but—”

“Bruce,” said Houdini.

“What?”

“Bruce Wayne. Batman. Batman’s hot right now. Try Gotham.”

Keyes entered Gotham, and it fit. “How about Wayne’s marching foe?” he asked.

“Penguin. March of the Penguins, get it?”

Keyes did. What was this guy doing at Central, anyway? He asked if Houdini were local.

“Oh, yeah. Dad moved here the year before I was born. He was a tobacco lawyer. For a while he was the king of torts. You know, tort lawyers love Mississippi, because all they have to do is show a local jury a big corporation and they whack it with a billion-dollar judgment. Dad used to say, ‘What a great state. If only they had a decent deli.’”

“Your Dad’s, uh, deceased?”

“No. In prison. Got five years for trying to bribe a judge. It’s not all bad. With him in the slammer I’ve been able to avoid the Ivy League and all that succeed-or-die crap. I study what I please, play games, work puzzles. Mom’s too busy shopping to care. But Dad gets out next month, so I’m afraid the good times may be over.”

Keyes gazed thoughtfully at Houdini. “About the extra reading.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

“I’ll make a list of books you can get through interlibrary loan. Oh, and I’ve been working on a book of my own.”

Keyes took the dog-eared printout of his manuscript from under the Gideon Bible and handed it over. “Just one chapter so far, but you might enjoy reading it. It’s kind of a hundred-and-seventy-year-old slasher movie, and it ends with a really neat puzzle. Maybe,” he suggested, in an offhand sort of way, “you can solve it.”

“My kind of stuff,” beamed Houdini, taking the pages. “And I like the title. Okay, okay, okay.”

As Keyes was seeing him to the door (an uncommon courtesy for him) Houdini tripped over his shoelaces again twice. Big eyes glued to the first page, he’d already begun reading the chapter that Keyes had titled—

BANDITS OF THE TRACE

Among the iconic figures of the early frontier—men like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Jim Bowie—Robert Tole stood out, less famous than they, but a lot meaner.

Tole was a bandit who worked the Natchez Trace, a 440-mile woodland track running south from Nashville, up hill and down dale, into fathomless marshes on one side and out on the other, abominable in wet weather and dangerous at all seasons. After selling their goods in New Orleans, flatboatmen used it to return to their homes in the Ohio country. Settlers used it to move south and west into the newly opened lands of the Mississippi Valley. The men wending northward had their profits tucked away in their saddlebags, while the people wending southward were burdened with everything they owned, money and animals and seed corn and furniture and featherbeds—all the whatnot they hoped to use in their new land.

For bandits, opportunity beckoned. No single haul was enormously rich, but the Trace yielded good, steady, dependable profits for enterprising scoundrels willing to shoot their victims down, gut them like fish, fill their carcasses with gravel, and dispose of them in God’s own wet graveyard, the eternally flowing fourth-largest river on Earth, so conveniently close at hand.

None did a better business than Robert Tole. His success depended on his rangy, powerful body—his deadly shooting eye—and, more than anything else, on his clever and ruthless lover, Justice Urquhart. Exactly why this small, intense female villain bore such an improbable name was a story in itself. Her father, Jacob Urquhart—known as Wrath-of-God to his neighbors—spent six days a week farming a spread on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. On Sunday he morphed into a particularly ferocious clergyman of the Sure and Everlasting Hellfire sect, and every one of his endless sermons was attended by his long-suffering wife and by his daughters, Justice and Chastity, the only survivors of a brood of seven whose other members perished in infancy.

“What’s in a name?” the farmer-clergyman had wondered, decided a lot, and named his girls (he had no sons) for virtues he particularly admired, to give them something to live up to. The results were not encouraging. The others, if they’d lived, might have exhibited Faith, Prudence, Charity, Mercy, and Wisdom, but the only ones who actually grew up were influenced by their names in reverse, if at all: Justice turned out a bandit, while Chastity became a whore. Detecting their appetite for sin, Wrath-of-God cast out of his house these “double damn’d Dotters of Satan,” leaving them freer than most women of the time to find their own way in the world.

Years later, Justice told her slave Jimson grim tales of her childhood—of endless graces delivered while the dinner chilled; of labor in the fields “from can’t-see to can’t-see;” of beatings administered with leather harness or a willow branch; of hiding from her father’s fury in a cistern, trying to support her younger sister while keeping her own head above water. Shortly after the girls left home, the farmhouse caught fire one winter night and consumed both parents. Justice hinted broadly that the fire had been no accident—though whether she was telling the truth or merely boasting, nobody ever knew.

How she met Robert Tole is equally uncertain. Perhaps at a barn-raising, or a church service, or a quilting-bee. But it seems more likely that she met him thirty miles downriver in the hell-raising precincts of Natchez-under-the-Hill, a perfect place for birds of their feather to flock together. There Jim Bowie (the Alamo still far in his future) made his hunting knife famous by driving it into the heart of an enemy during a brawl on a sandbar. There carousing river-rats like Mike Fink butted and gouged each other for cheating at faro, then relaxed in the arms of ladies as repugnant as themselves. Chastity worked in the brothels for a time, and perhaps Justice did too, but the records are few and obscure, and all we know for certain is that she told her slave boy, “I larnt Sin as I larnt the Bible, in a hard School.”

In any case, she and Robert Tole found each other. Perhaps the Devil was the real matchmaker. He certainly had few if any more enthusiastic disciples, and—until Bonnie and Clyde rolled across the South in their flivver a hundred years later—he had none more loyal to their unhallowed union.

Exactly how the diminutive Justice (she stood hardly more than four feet high at a time when the average woman was closer to five) ruled the hulking and brutal Robert was one of the mysteries of the time. For rule him she did.

Consider sex. A confirmed womanizer before he met Justice, he became as monogamous as a churchwarden afterward. Some people suggested that her secret was a Byzantine panoply of sexual skills she’d acquired Under-the-Hill and deployed to keep him drained of lust. But many believed that Tole stayed faithful to Justice simply because he was afraid of her—she was a dead shot, and absolutely fearless. Whatever the inner secrets of their relationship, they made a formidable pair.

Picture a party of settlers moving down the Trace (nobody sane rode it alone). A guide on horseback leads the way, followed by yoked oxen pulling wagons, perhaps with a slave or two prodding them on. The women are riding in the wagons, nursing babies or chewing snuff or gossiping; the men, armed to the teeth, ride or walk alongside. Moving at two or three miles an hour, the immigrants lurch and canter into one of the marshy spots, where the trail narrows and quaking bogs clothed in fever green stretch away to either side. The undergrowth is dense, the insect chorus loud as a church organ.

Suddenly a shot rings out. The guide topples from his horse. Crows take flight, screeching like rusty hinges. Children are crying, a woman screams. Gunmen hidden in the brush begin firing into the demoralized settlers. A startled horse plunges into the bog and promptly sinks to its saddle girth. A rider at the back of the column turns to flee, but Justice steps from the undergrowth holding a horse-pistol in a two-handed grip and shoots him down. Robert Tole, having stashed the long rifle he used to open the attack, arrives with a pepper-pot pistol in each hand and begins shooting anything that moves. Three or four hireling villains emerge from the brush to finish the slaughter. Men, women, and children are butchered and some are scalped, for frontiersmen as much as Indians like to carry away a trophy from a good day’s hunting.

The settler party has been erased. The bodies are loaded into one of the wagons, hauled to the river, gutted, and thrown in. Giant catfish swarm to the feast. Meanwhile Justice divides the loot, and the hirelings take their shares and slip away, to reappear next day as peaceful farmers or even as substantial citizens of the brand-new hamlet of Bonaparte. The lion’s share of the valuables are taken to Tole’s Cavern—of which, more in a moment. The wreckage is set afire. By sundown that part of the forest is empty of human life. Even the crows are quiet.

That night the chief villains relax in the Cavern. Armed now with a goose-quill pen instead of a pistol, Justice sits writing on a mahogany lap-desk while Robert dictates. “Hereafter fine Gentlemen had better call me Robert Toll, for each and every one that passes along the Trace must pay Toll to him who rules the wild Countrey, the which is not some Quarter-Wit in Washington, nor some strutting Ass in a Militia Uniform, but is in fact Mine Own Self.”

When the letter is finished, folded, and closed with sealing-wax, a local boy will earn himself a handful of the cheap paper money called shinplasters by delivering it to the Natchez post office. In time the editor of the Advertiser or the Southern Galaxy will tickle his readers by printing it under a headline like The Road-Agent Tole Again Boasts of His Infamous Crimes.

Wrath-of-God Urquhart had flogged literacy into his daughters to make them able to read Holy Writ and copy out its precepts. Well, this was how Justice used her skill—one that must have seemed almost magical to an ignoramus like Robert Tole. And it gave her another hold over her dangerous lover. Besides being his bedmate and accomplice, she was also his scribe who, he thought, would make him famous in his own time and a byword to later generations.

In one of his raids Tole captured half a dozen slaves. One day he took them to a high bluff overlooking the river and ordered them to cut timber and split it into rough boards, then excavate a tunnel in the loess and use the wood to shore up the sides and roof. The floor was simply hard earth, pounded down by many bare feet coming and going, and the tunnel at first nothing but a crude warehouse for goods he’d stolen but hadn’t yet disposed of. In the woods nearby he penned captive animals, until he could sell them to passing boatmen or unscrupulous locals.

Then, at Justice’s bidding, he began turning the Cavern into a home. A slave who was a skilled carpenter built and framed and installed a door to make it livable in winter, then laid a wooden floor and fashioned a few pieces of rough furniture. Justice brought in carpets and comfortable bedding. What happened to the slaves when the Cavern was finished, nobody knew—one by one, Tole led them away, and they were not seen again. The single exception was a boy called Jimson, whom the outlaws kept to serve as what they called their “House Nigger.” He swept and scrubbed and polished and every day took his forty licks, for Justice like her Papa was an enthusiastic flogger.

From Jimson’s testimony we know that by 1830 or thereabouts the Cavern had become an underground residence, rudely comfortable, the wooden floors scattered with rugs, smooth clapboards covering the rough walls, storerooms off the main tunnel where the robbers kept foodstuffs and items for sale, a curtained alcove with a four-poster bed where the master and mistress slept, and a fireplace and clay chimney at the rear that gave warmth and light and also helped to suck in fresh air and keep the Cavern from becoming stuffy. Brass whale-oil lamps hung from the ceiling, their light screened from boats on the river by thickets of yaupon and wild holly.

Lounging outside were six or seven big, ill-natured dogs that earned their keep by acting as guards and an early-warning system. Jimson made friends with the dogs by stealing them extra food, and didn’t fear them. But he desperately feared his owners, and he had no doubt which was worse: “Master Robert, he would just as soon kill you as look at you. But Mistress Justice, she would rather kill you than look at you.”

He feared not only her cruelty but her intelligence. She could stare fixedly at him and see what he was thinking; she could read and write; and she had a way with numbers the slave boy thought unnatural in a woman. Wrath-of-God had forced her to learn ciphering as an incentive to thrift, and she’d taken to it like the proverbial duck to water. But for Jimson (in this respect a typical male of his time) to see her keeping a big ledger—entering items they’d stolen and the value and adding up columns of figures in her head—made him wonder if the Devil were not her instructor. Or even her true begetter. Maybe, he thought, Wrath-of-God had only been Old Nick’s cuckold, as the preacher himself seemed to think when he called her a “dotter of Satan.”

With thoughts like this buzzing in his head, nobody was more surprised than Jimson when she began to confide in him. The reason was a new resident of the Cavern, one that scared both of them. Rats and mice had gotten into the storerooms, and one day a corn snake invited itself in from the woods to pursue the rodents. Justice wanted to kill it, but Tole said no, it wasn’t poisonous and would do a better job than any cat. He named it Shadow (pronounced Shadder) because it moved so silently, and let it do what came naturally.

Shadder was first-rate at pest control, pursuing the rodents down the holes they’d gnawed through and behind the walls, wrapping them in its coils and suffocating them, then swallowing them head-first until the last half-inch of naked tail disappeared from view. The mice went early on, and the snake grew and cast its skin. The rats followed, and Shadder left more and more dry papery skins about the Cavern, like ghostly memorials of itself. Quickly it reached the normal limit of its kind—about five feet—but then a puppy disappeared, and another, and Shadder began to expand in length and girth in a manner that seemed to defy nature.

Was it really a corn snake, or had a python somehow gotten loose on the Mississippi frontier? Jimson said that Shadder looked “like a quilted Bolster,” a phrase suggesting the elegant attire in which pythons go about their business. Well, New Orleans traded with the world, and ships sometimes brought back surprising stowaways. Small animal shows and circuses wandered up and down the river, stopping off in towns along the way to fleece the locals, and strange snakes had always been a draw for the gaping public. So the possibility that Shadder was an exotic import that had escaped its captors can’t be rejected out of hand.

Whatever the truth, it grew and grew, and the bigger it got the more it fascinated Robert Tole. The man liked dangerous pets, and besides, he’d finally found something Justice feared and he didn’t. On off-nights, when he wasn’t murdering anybody, he took to draping Shadder around his neck and shuffling clumsily through the Cavern like a dancing bear, swilling corn whiskey from a jug and roaring out a coarse brothel song—

Shagged and shagged until I stove her!

Rig-a-jig-jig, rig-a-jig-jig, rig-a-jig-jig, très bon!

(Pronounced tray bone.) The carpenter slave had made Tole an outsized chair, a throne for this king of the wild country, and when he was tired of solo dancing he’d collapse on it, hefting his demijohn with one hand and with the other caressing Shadder, another cold-blooded predator with which he felt a kinship.

Speaking of cold blood, Shadder liked to sleep next to a human for warmth, and since Justice absolutely excluded it from her bed, that left the slave boy to serve as its warming-pan on winter nights. The rustling of his corn-shuck mattress would wake him and he’d find a cool and scaly bedmate beside him—one he was too frightened to disturb, especially after it grew to a length above nine feet, and a girth thicker than a stove pipe. Justice sympathized, quoting him Genesis 3:14-15 from memory and adding darkly that this time “‘tis Adam and not Eve who heeds the Sarpent.”

From that small beginning—a shared fear—a surprising intimacy grew up between mistress and slave. Tole was no conversationalist, tending to alternate grim silence with drunken raving, and perhaps Justice merely needed someone to chat with. In any case, she got in the habit of talking to Jimson, not only about their mutual loathing of Shadder, but about other things as well. She told him tales of her childhood, and once mentioned that she and Tole had accumulated “a Treasure.” Getting it hadn’t been easy, she said, for few of their victims could be called rich. “They are but poor Buckra,” she sneered, meaning buckwheat, the least edible of grains.

Yet even people of modest means owned rings and other trinkets, and all carried some gold and silver coins, the only money that was accepted everywhere. The bandits kept the coins and the few good gems that came their way, and sold the trinkets to honest householders of Bonaparte “who would not spit on us in Daylight, but welcome us warmly after Dark, knowing we cannot come into the open Market, and so must sell cheap the Baubles we risque our Lives for.”

From time to time either Tole or Justice would take a bag of gold and silver, ride away on a captured mule, and return empty-handed. Jimson deduced that they had a hiding place, a sort of private bank, and in fact Justice occasionally spoke of “making a Deposite.” She told Jimson that in time she and her lover would retrieve the treasure and vanish, south to Cuba or west to Texas, there to live out their lives in luxury “as a Lady and Gentleman ought to, with a fine House and Horses and many Servants to do our Bidding.”

This was dangerous knowledge, as Jimson recognized. No one except Tole and Justice knew how much the treasure amounted to, or where it was kept, and Jimson, being illiterate, could not read her ledger even when he was alone in the Cavern. Yet he believed that merely knowing of the treasure’s existence would ultimately get him killed. Between fear of his owners and fear of the snake, his life was almost unbearable, and yet he could not run away because Tole would come after him with the dogs, which knew his scent.

His chance to escape came suddenly in 1834. One spring morning, a tremendous bang from the direction of the river brought Tole running to the edge of the bluff. Jimson joined him, and together they watched the steamboat Cincinnati, disabled by an exploding boiler, drift grandly into a slough and stick fast on a sandbar. While the passengers sunned themselves and the crew worked to repair the damage, Justice mounted a mule and set off at a gallop to summon their gang. At sundown the brigands attacked, and general slaughter and looting followed. When Tole forced the captain to open his safe, he found that the boat was carrying Treasury gold in the sum of six thousand, four hundred and thirty-two dollars—in value closer to three hundred thousand today—to pay the soldiers in the New Orleans garrison.

This was a coup beyond the bandits’ wildest dreams. Tole and Justice resolved to keep every penny for themselves. Treacherously they shot down their hirelings, then set the Cincinnati afire. Back in the Cavern, Tole roared out his usual song and swilled whiskey and strutted up and down with Shadder draped around his shoulders like a living garment. But the practical Justice ordered Jimson to begin packing clothes in some small trunks they’d stolen from travelers. Then, taking the strongbox with the government gold, she set out on her mule to make a final “Deposite.”

Jimson concluded that his masters—after a last “fire sale” of goods taken from the Cincinnati —now intended to gather up their treasure and flee. And he felt sure that their final act before going would be to cut his throat, for, as Tole liked to say, “The Dead do’n’t bite.” When the drunken bandit passed out, the slave boy threw some food to the dogs to keep them occupied and fled into the woods, with only the vaguest idea of what direction he should take to reach Bonaparte, or what would happen to him if and when he got there.

Next day, news of the Cincinnati’s destruction spread apace and local people turned violently against the bandits. None doubted that President Jackson would send troops to avenge the theft of the Army’s gold. But news of the affair would take weeks to reach Washington, and the troops would take more weeks to reach Bonaparte. So the locals resolved to take matters into their own hands—some because they were honestly outraged by the massacre, others because they’d been receivers of stolen goods and feared Old Hickory’s wrath if he found out. Whatever their motives, everybody agreed that Tole and Justice needed to hang, and hang quick.

Men armed themselves, and Sheriff Micah Jones of Burr County formed a posse. By the time his force was ready to move, he knew exactly where to look for the bandits, for Jimson, after struggling through dense tangles of woodland and swamp, had staggered into town, hungry, exhausted, and covered with mosquito bites. He began telling his story, and it’s from his testimony, taken down by the local schoolmaster and later bound and sent to the archives in Washington, that we know so many details about the bandits and about life in the Cavern.

Jimson doubted they would ever be caught. “Right now,” he said, “they most likely be taking their Treasure away to a far Countrey, where they can live like Kings and Queens.”

“They are going nowhere,” the sheriff assured him, “save to a Ball where they will dance on Air, to the Tune of the Dead March.”

Despite his fear of his former masters, Jimson bravely agreed to lead the posse back to the Cavern—a service for which the state legislature would later liberate him through an Act of Manumission sponsored by Sheriff Jones, and endorsed by the free citizens of Bonaparte, white and black.

With the sheriff and Jimson in the lead, the posse struggled through thorns and thickets to the Cavern, and found it devoid of life. But not of death. Robert Tole sat slumped in his big chair, his face blue, his eyes protruding like hard-boiled eggs. The outlaw king had draped Shadder around his neck once too often, and the coil of rope brought by the sheriff had been rendered superfluous. The corpse’s head was covered by a peculiar glaze, like the track of a huge snail plastering down the hair, and a few broken recurved teeth were embedded in the scalp. Jones concluded that Shadder had tried to ingest its former master, only to be defeated by the width of his shoulders.

The fate of Justice was worse. The huge snake had left a trail leading down the bluff to the river, and there the posse discovered a thick and ill-smelling pile of dung. Embedded in it was one of Justice’s tiny shoes, much charred by the fearsome acids of Shadder’s stomach. After being suffocated in its coils, the petite villainess had gone head-first down the throat of the only thing in the world she feared.

Sheriff Jones took possession of her lap-desk and the papers inside. The ledger was all very businesslike, listing the items taken on each raid and the prices they’d been sold for. A grand total entered just before the looting of the Cincinnati showed the value of the thieves’ treasure to be “in Sum, about 81 Thousands of $.” She’d never lived to enter the value of the loot from the Cincinnati, for Shadder had been waiting when she returned to the Cavern.

Adding in the federal gold and whatever the bandits got by robbing the steamboat’s passengers, it appears quite possible that our businesslike villains through years of robbery and murder had amassed almost ninety thousand dollars in gold and silver and gems. A huge sum at that time, when many a laborer fed and clothed and sheltered himself and his family—yes, and managed to get drunk every night on bad whiskey, too—on wages of a dollar a day. Today, of course, it would be worth much more, since the numismatic rather than the face value of the coins would have to be considered. Millions, probably—it’s hard to guess how many.

Besides the ledger, the desk contained writing paper and a letter already sealed and addressed to Justice’s sister, Chastity, in New Orleans “at the House of Mme Lacaze, near the Ramparts.” It read:

Dearest Sister, Presarve well these verses from Holy Scripture, for our Lives are perilous, and if aught sh’d befall Rob’t and me, they will guide you by one, by two, and by three to those Gleanings, which we have gather’d with such Toil, thro’ a thousand Perils.

—

Proverbs, 20:15; Matthew, 7:7.

—

NUMBERS, 6:8

DEUTERONOMY, 5:7

II CHRONICLES, 7:15

JOSHUA, 3:12

MATTHEW, 4:9

CORINTHIANS, 1:21

TITUS, 2:9

The Bible was favorite reading in those days, and we can be sure that when the posse returned to Bonaparte the testaments were pawed in a kind of frenzy, everyone looking for a clue to the bandits’ Gleanings.

The first citations were encouraging, for the verse in Proverbs begins, “There is gold and abundance of costly stones,” while the verse in Matthew promises, “Seek and ye shall find.” From that point on, however, the way of the treasure hunters became as tangled as the path to the Cavern. The subsequent books were listed in correct order, but were scattered across the Old and New Testaments in a seemingly pointless way. II Chronicles was specified, but I or II Numbers was not, leaving in doubt which was meant. The texts seemed to have nothing to do with the treasure, or with each other. And yet if some sort of code was involved, it ought to be a simple one, devised by two farm girls and based on the only book they’d ever read.

Then Sheriff Jones had an idea. The steamboat Girl of the Golden West was docked at Natchez, bound for New Orleans, and Jones persuaded the captain to carry a warrant to the authorities there, charging Chastity as an accessory to murder and river piracy. Once she was in his hands, Jones felt sure he could persuade her, one way or another, to explain the mysterious document left by Justice. But here he encountered the only absolutely immovable obstacle in the world. New Orleans’s Criminal Sheriff reported that Chastity, while pursuing her vocation, had been throttled by a customer whose gold watch she’d attempted to steal when she thought he was asleep.

At Bonaparte, hit-or-miss became the rule for the treasure hunters. For a while, giant moles seemed to have attacked the town, as busy fools dug here, there, and everywhere, guided by dowsing rods or dreams or the babblings of the local witches, all of whom turned out to be wrong. The old Urquhart farm was the only place where the sisters had definitely been known to live together, but even finding it turned out to be a baffling problem. It had never been formally surveyed, so there was no plat to work from. The burned-down ruins of the house had long since vanished, and the fields had either been swallowed up by dense second-growth woodland, or occupied by squatters, or had sloughed into the Mississippi, which then as ever was hard at work undermining its banks. Not a single identifiable trace remained of the farm where Justice and Chastity had spent their unhappy childhoods, having virtue beaten into them and consequently learning to hate it.

In time Treasury agents arrived, took depositions, and departed, carrying the documents from the lap-desk and the transcript of Jimson’s testimony with them. Meanwhile troops sent by Old Hickory scoured the Trace, capturing and hanging a score of the scoundrels who infested it, and sending the others in panicked flight across the river into the Western Territories.

As a result, it became a far safer road, and the whole region profited. Within a few decades Bonaparte grew from a hamlet into a thriving town with a courthouse, a jail, a barber shop, a billiard hall, four saloons, two brothels, and a Presbyterian church. By the time of the Civil War (which hardly touched it, for all the action was either downriver at New Orleans or upriver at Vicksburg), comfortable houses covered land that might once have belonged to Wrath-of-God’s hardscrabble farm. The treasure left by Tole and Justice was never found, and its legend remains today one of the choice mysteries of the Mid-Mississippi Valley, and especially of Bonaparte, where it may—or may not—still lie hidden.

Two days passed without a word from Houdini, and Keyes thought: another bust.

Each day he dropped by Tom’s Trash & Treasures, a musty shop on Bonaparte’s Main Street, to inquire about the guy who’d found the lead plates, Jamie Something-or-Other. But Tom said Jamie was a roofer currently working in New Orleans, putting roofs back on houses that had lost them in you-know-what.

How had he found the plates? Well, Jamie’s hobby was going around with a metal detector looking for Civil War memorabilia like bullets and buttons, and one day he dug up the plates.

“He didn’t say where he found them?” Keyes asked, and Tom growled, “For the fifth time, no.”

“You’ve got his cell phone number?”

“Yeah, and I’ve called him, but he don’t answer.”

“Suppose you give me the number and I’ll try it.”

“I don’t give out people’s numbers without their permission. I’ve told you that five times, too.”

Cretin, thought Keyes. Nothing was working right for him.

The third morning after his talk with Houdini, Keyes was drinking bad coffee in his office and gazing balefully at the still unfinished Batman crossword, when his own phone began to bleat.

“Yeah?” he growled, and the voice of Bernard Marx said, “Well, I got it.”

Keyes’s mind was still locked onto a clue that said Wayne’s feathered friend? Oh, hell, how obvious, he thought, and wrote down Robin, while muttering, “Got what?”

“The code. Wanna take me to lunch?”

Keyes did. They met in the rundown campus cafeteria named Bilbo Commons (and invariably called Dildo Commons). Accustomed to the pukey way the food smelled, neither complained as they filled their plastic trays and carried them to a corner table. There, through mouthfuls of ghastly country-fried steak, macerated Brussels sprouts, and other academic viands, Bernard explained how he’d unraveled in a few days a mystery that had been bothering people for the past hundred and seventy years.

“It’s kind of a dumb code,” he mumbled, “but in a way it’s kind of smart, too. I mean, everything’s there. You start with those first two Bible quotes, ‘There is gold,’ and ‘Seek and ye shall find.’ That tells Chastity what it’s all about. Then you go to block letters, so there’s been a change. And the list starts with Numbers. Well, I read in Bandits of the Trace where Justice was a natural with numbers, so I thought, hey, that’s a hint. The code is somewhere in the numbers.”

“Go on!” said Keyes, who was getting interested. “Go on!”

“I must’ve messed with those damn numbers all night. And then about four a.m., when I was too tired to keep making the same mistakes, suddenly I thought: Whoa! Justice says by one, by two, and by three. Well, if you put the Bible chapters in numerical order they go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I could use some coffee.”

With the alacrity of a well-trained waiter, Keyes fetched a Dixie cup of brownish fluid from the coffee-and-soup machine. Houdini dumped three pink packets of Sweeter ‘n’ Sweet into it, stirred it with one of the plastic straws that served the diners at Bilbo Commons in place of teaspoons, and went on:

“So I tried rearranging the books, lining them up numerically instead of by how they appear in the Bible. And I got—lemme show you—”

He commandeered a paper napkin, borrowed Keyes’s ballpoint pen, and wrote:

1st chapter of C O R I N T H I A N S Verse 21

2nd “ “ T I T U S “ 9

3rd “ “ J O S H U A “ 12

4th “ “ M A T T H E W “ 9

5th “ “ N U M B E R S “ 8

6th “ “ D E U T E R O N O M Y “ 7

7th “ “ I I C H R O N I C L E S “ 15

“As soon as I got it arranged like that, I saw it. It’s just like Justice said. You take the first letter of the first word and the second letter of the second word, and so on, and you get ‘cistern.’ And I thought, cistern? So I went back to Bandits again, and I saw—”

“You saw,” said Keyes, heart palpitating, “that Justice and Chastity used to hide in a cistern to escape from their Papa’s wrath. The wrath of God, you might say. A lot of the old houses had underground cisterns to catch rainwater from the roof for drinking and cooking. And the water table’s low up on the bluff, so after the house burned the water slowly oozed away. The empty cistern must have looked like the perfect hiding place.”

“Now you got it,” said Houdini, like a kindly teacher encouraging a backward student. “And those Bible verses—well, obviously, once again it’s the numbers that count. The numbers that count,” he repeated. “I might think that’s funny, if only I had a sense of humor. Anyway, when you add ‘em up, they come to eighty-one. I went back to Bandits again, and that’s the last total Justice lived to write down. And the word thousand appears in the letter, underlined at that. So translated, the whole message says, Hey, Chastity, look, girl. There’s a treasure in the cistern, and it’s worth 81 thou.

“And,” Houdini finished, swallowing his lethally oversweetened coffee at a gulp, “that’s also why the solution’s not worth a crap. The one thing she doesn’t say is where the cistern’s located, because Chastity already knew that. And since nobody today even knows where the farm used to be, much less the house, much less the cistern, and since there’s a town built on top of it all, well—”

“But it was a brilliant job of decryption,” said Keyes, and shook Houdini’s hand with rare warmth as they parted.

He was so close to it now. So close to wealth and freedom. Back in his office, he belched—the least unpleasant consequence of a meal at Bilbo Commons—lined up the heavy lead plates side by side on his desk, and read aloud the mysterious words cut into the soft metal: Faith. Prudence. Charity. Mercy. Wisdom.

In all the world, only he knew that the plates were grave markers for dead infants. And the graves didn’t lie in some municipal cemetery (none existed when the tiny bodies were interred) but in a private burial ground. After a hundred and seventy years the Urquhart farm had been rediscovered, courtesy of a Civil War buff with a metal detector. And somewhere on that farm was the cistern.

Maybe there was a God, after all.

Further proof of this thesis was quickly forthcoming. First of all, Keyes finished the puzzle. Tragic jester in Wayne’s pack? queried the clue (6 letters, ends with R). Keyes, who’d been reading up on recent Batmania, thought suddenly of the dead guy that all the reviews said had given the best and final performance of his life as the Joker. Ledger, he wrote, and it not only fit—it gave him the crossing words, too.

He was still admiring the completed puzzle when his phone bleated again. A gruff, unfamiliar male voice asked, “You the guy Tom says wants to talk with me?”

Keyes said yes, surprised at the calmness of his voice. Jamie the roofer was apologetic.

“I keep forgetting to check my mailbox, you know? About them lead plates I found—Tom said you bought ‘em, so I guess you got a right to know where they come from. I found ‘em in Reservoir Park, behind the college, up near the water tower. That’s what you wanted to know, right?”

“Right,” said Keyes. “And thanks for calling.”

He didn’t sleep that night. Didn’t especially want to. He bought a bottle of brandy at Bonaparte Package Liquors and sat in the kitchen of his rundown house on a back street, sipping fluid fire from a Wal-Mart snifter and planning the final phase of the treasure hunt. He’d have to rent a metal detector and learn how to use it, then divide the park into squares and go over it systematically, foot by foot. Sooner or later all that metal in the cistern—all that precious metal—would set the gadget squealing—

Unless. Unless the treasure had been found already. Unless some bastardly robber had stolen it before he could. Unless, once he found it, the IRS claimed it for taxes and the Treasury claimed it because of the Army payroll. Unless the town fathers of Bonaparte claimed it because it was found on municipal property. Unless legal fees ate up whatever he gained. At the end of the process, would anything be left? Who did he know that was slick enough to secure the treasure for its rightful owner?

He could think of only one name. Next day he bought Houdini lunch again in the Commons, told him that he now knew where to find the cistern with the treasure, and made his pitch.

“When your Dad gets out of jail, I’m going to need his help as legal adviser. On a contingency basis, of course. I’m prepared to offer him one percent of my net gains.”

Houdini didn’t even stop chewing before saying, “Fifty.”

“Ten.”

“Thirty. He won’t take any less. If he accepted less than thirty, he’d spend the rest of his life brooding about it. I let him screw me, he’d think. It’s a question of manhood with him. He’s my father, but he’s also a fruitcake. You wanna pay less, find yourself another crook.”

After a brief struggle with himself, Keyes asked, “You think he’ll go for it on that basis?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s still fighting disbarment, but he knows it’s coming, so he’ll want to make a final killing before he retires to Palm Beach. When do we start going over the place where Justice hid the loot?”

“After I have the contract in hand—signed, sealed, and delivered.”

“Right. One thing you never wanna do with my old man is trust him. I learned that when I was still watching Romper Room.”

Bandits of the Trace, thought Keyes. Every century produces its own kind.

She’d guarded it long and guarded it well. She’d died for it, and then—discovering in herself a power that could only have come from her true father—she’d captured the body of the beast that killed her. She’d have shared the treasure with Chastity, who was in every sense her sister. But Chastity never came.

*

She stirred, her immense pale coils rustling with the motion. Her garnet eyes stared blindly. They were all gone—the mother she could hardly remember, the stepfather she’d hated, the sister she’d loved, Robert whose life she’d ruled and guided with an inner strength she’d felt but hadn’t yet understood.

All gone. All but the treasure. That she would keep.

She was deaf, of course, yet suddenly her delicate, flickering tongue picked up the vibrations of men walking, three of them. A shovel struck the earth above. Steel grated on ancient brick. Someone coming to rob her? After all this time? They’d get a surprise!

She tensed, ready to defend what was hers.