The Nine Pound Hammer (3 page)

Ray walked on and on throughout the morning. What began as a rolling hill country set beneath a canopy of oaks and maples soon grew more dense and dark. He could not imagine any stretch of forest going on so long. But this was the South, and to his mind, that meant a wilder, greener, and more mysterious place than the cities up north. The forest was brimming with an eerie solitude, punctuated only occasionally by a rustling squirrel or flittering birds. By noon the wilderness grew so dark that Ray could barely tell if it was night or day, and a spell of dizziness struck him as he considered the vastness of the wild that surrounded him. He cursed himself for being so ridiculously impulsive. Did he think he could jump into the
middle of nowhere without any thought to what he’d eat? It wasn’t Seventeenth Street, where he could swipe a cold sausage from a street vendor’s pushcart. This was quite possibly seventeen miles to anywhere.

Ray was not sure what he had imagined the lodestone would lead him to, but it had not been this looming, desolate wilderness.

He rested in the afternoon at a creek bubbling from a mossy boulder. Ray cupped his hands in the cold water and drank, hoping it would stop the complaints growing in his stomach. He would be out before dark, he assured himself. Maybe he’d find a farm with a warm meal and comfortable bed. Even sleeping in the straw of a stable would be fine.

Emboldened to get out of the woods, Ray stood and checked the lodestone. It was still pulling in the same direction, so he continued. But as night fell and he was still in the vast forest, Ray curled up at the roots of a big black locust tree, hungry, footsore, and more than a little frightened. Eventually he slept.

Things went no better the following day. He was alone, in a place both alien and potentially dangerous. Late in the afternoon, Ray found some berries and, painfully hungry, he ate them. Fifteen minutes later, he got sick. No more berries, he decided.

He slept that night in an abandoned logging camp. The walls of the lean-to shelters were riddled with bullet holes.
He hoped as he searched the jumble of buildings that he wouldn’t find a dead body. He didn’t. But he did find a couple of water skins and a moth-eaten blanket. All the food had long since rotted into black puddles in boxes.

He filled the water skins the following morning in a stream. He had never been this hungry in his life—even at the worst moments when he and Sally were living on the streets.

After about half an hour of walking, a buzzing of bees brought his attention to a hollow log partway up a rise in the forest. Bees, he thought. That meant honey! Faint with hunger, Ray decided a few bee stings might be worth it. After shooing away the hovering bees with his cap, Ray crouched on his blanket to dig out the honeycomb.

Reaching up to his shoulder into the log, he touched something soft, instead of a sticky honeycomb. Working it close enough to grab, he pulled out a yellow hat. The color was striking against the dark greens and grays of the forest, but what surprised Ray most was not the color itself but the reason for it: the hat was formed completely of dandelions, as fresh and bright as if they were growing on a spring lawn.

Ray turned the hat over in his hands, thinking how strange it was to find a hat in a log—especially a hat made of flowers. Ray wondered if fatigue and hunger were driving him to hallucinations. Then he heard a faint voice over the rise.

Ducking behind the log, Ray’s first thought was of men
with guns who had shot up the logging camp. What if they were bandits and he had stumbled onto their camp? Was it too much to hope that they would feed him?

Ray crept to the top of the hill and found himself on a rim overlooking a wide depression in the ground that was encircled by close-growing trees. At the bottom, a small man was sitting alone at the roots of a single massive oak.

The man had a jagged explosion of golden-yellow hair and was whining and whispering to himself piteously. The man’s clothes were tattered and patched in a hundred places with a different square of fabric for every hole. On his ankle he wore a leather fetter with an iron lock, the chain curling around to the oak at his back.

As Ray leaned forward to get a better look, the root under his hands gave way with a crack, sending him splayed forward on his belly partway down the slope. The wild man looked up with surprise. Ray snatched the dandelion hat from where it had fallen and scrambled back up to hide again behind the tree.

“Is that my hat?” the wild man called in a peculiar high-pitched voice.

Ray’s heart thumped in his throat as he tried to decide whether to speak to the man or simply run away.

“Where did you find it?” the man called again, waiting a few silent moments for an answer. “What you hiding for? En’t going to hurt you.” Ray heard him rattle the chain. “Here I’m tied to the tree and can’t get away. Can you help me?”

Ray called from around the tree. “Have you got any food?”

“No, en’t got nothing for you to eat. Sorry. Can you give me my hat?”

Ray fidgeted behind the tree. The lodestone had pulled him this direction, hadn’t it? Ray took a deep breath and came around the tree, looking down cautiously at the strange man at the bottom of the depression. “Who are you?”

“Peter Hobnob,” the man said.

“How long have you been here?” Ray asked.

“Not too sure. Few weeks I guess.” Peter Hobnob was standing now, and Ray could see he was not very tall—maybe a little more than five feet. His features were thorny, all points and angles at his nose, chin, and eyes. He didn’t look as dangerous as he had when he was talking to himself like a crazy man, and Ray supposed that as long as he was chained to the tree, he couldn’t attack him.

“How could you be out here that long and not eat? You’ve got to have some food.”

Hobnob smiled, his expression youthful and puckish. “I eat whatever blows my way, if you see my meaning.”

“No, I don’t,” Ray said.

“None’s the difference. So can you toss me my hat?”

Ray decided there was no harm in it; he started down.

“Stop there!” Hobnob yelled with agitation as Ray reached the bottom of the slope. “Mind the acorns!”

“The what?” Ray noticed for the first time that there
were acorns all over the bottom of the depression, surrounding the giant oak and the wild man.

“Don’t take another step. Them acorns. They’s dangerous.”

“What do you mean?”

Hobnob tapped the hard trunk of the oak and said, “Devil’s oak. Wicked tree it is. Them acorns is poisonous, along with the leaves and bark and near everything else it’s got. Step on one and you let out the poison. Be dead before you realized you breathed it in. Come a little closer and toss the hat over to me.” He motioned with his hands for Ray to throw the hat.

“I’ve never heard of a tree like that,” Ray said, looking up at the branches doubtfully.

“Heard of it or not, none’s the difference,” Hobnob said, waving his hands impatiently.

Ray ran his fingers curiously over the soft yellow petals covering the dandelion hat. “How did you get out here?” he asked.

Hobnob sighed and answered. “Locked me out here as punishment.”

“Who?”

“The Pirate Queen.”

“The wh-what?” Ray stammered.

“Pirate Queen. She’s my boss—the captain of the
Snapdragon
. Terrible woman she is.” He shivered. “Don’t much like working for her. None of us do, but who’s going to tell her you’re quits? Recall old Joshua trying that once.
Sewed his lips shut, she did. Or did she cut out his tongue? Don’t recollect exactly as I weren’t there at the time, but he never complained much after. No, none of us did.”

His voice dropped to a whisper. “You know, she wears a necklace with a bullet on it. Cursed charm it is. The very one that pierced the skull of Abraham the Emancipator. You know him?”

“No.” Ray was wondering how sane this man really was.

“Don’t know the president? One from the War of the Rebellion?”

“Abraham Lincoln?”

“That’s the one,” he said, firing his finger like a pistol.

“She wears a necklace with the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln?”

“Just for spite.” Hobnob smiled grimly.

Ray scratched his head and asked, “So are you a pirate?”

“Not rightly a pirate. Just your common thief. Who are you anyway?”

“Ray, Ray Fleming. So why did the Pirate Queen chain you up out here?”

“See, she says I stole her silver dagger.” Hobnob made a slicing pantomime with his finger. “The one she uses to cut the tips off her cigars.”

“Did you steal it?” Ray asked.

Hobnob scratched at his thicket of hair. “Well, yes. But she wants it back, and I en’t got it no more.”

“Where is it?”

“Lost her cursed ripper. This here’s the Lost Wood.”
Hobnob threw his hands out in a wide arc. “All manner of things, people, and such get lost in this wild’ness. You, friend, for example, and that silver dagger. Dropped it over these here woods when I was flying along—”

“Flying! What were you flying in? A balloon or something?”

“No, nothing like that. Just flying. With my hat, see?”

Ray shook his head and screwed up his brow. “So she’s locking you up until you find the dagger, but you can’t find the dagger if you’re tied up?”

“Something like that. But she don’t think I lost it. Wants me to confess where I’ve hid it. Sends one of the pirates from the
Snapdragon
out here every few days to get me to fess up.”

Ray glanced around, wondering if some pirate was walking up at that moment. “But you’re a thief. Can’t you pick the lock?”

“Can’t. But the key’s out there somewhere.” Hobnob gestured to the field of acorns surrounding him. “Hidden in one of them acorns.”

“Not much of a thief if you can’t pick a lock,” Ray said.

Hobnob seemed to wilt—his shoulders, head, and hands drooping loosely with exhaustion. “If you could just …”

Ray looked down at the dandelion hat. “Sure,” he said, taking a step closer.

“Careful!” Hobnob squeaked.

Ray took the hat in a firm grip, gauged the distance to Hobnob, and flicked the yellow hat out. For a few yards the hat was on course, but then it curved away, landing softly in the acorns several yards from the thief. Hobnob put his face in his hands and shook his head.

“Sorry,” Ray said.

“Not much of a thrower, are you?” Hobnob sank back to the ground.

“Look, I’ll try to get the hat.” Ray began to tiptoe toward the hat.

“No!” Hobnob barked. “Don’t go walking any closer. You’ll step on an acorn and murder us both.”

“Let me see what I can do.” Ray pulled the lodestone from his pocket. He untied the end of the twine that connected the lodestone to his belt loop. “I think I can fish it out.”

Hobnob rolled his eyes.

The lodestone would give him enough weight to swing the makeshift fishing line out to the hat. But Ray still needed a way to snag the hat. He needed a hook. Ray looked around. There was not much, except sticks. That would have to do.

Ray wedged a broken twig through the twine on the lodestone. He had his hook. Ray eyed the dandelion hat. He walked around, careful not to tread on any acorns, until the hat was about ten feet away. The twine was only a little more than three feet—too short to reach the hat.

“Just a moment,” Ray said, but Hobnob seemed to have given up hope.

Ray ran back up the hill to the log where he’d left his blanket. He pulled off some loose wool threads from the edge and began tying them together to lengthen his “fishing line.” As he returned to the edge of the acorns, he swung the lodestone around on the string. With the right toss, he might hook the hat and be able to pull it back. But if the lodestone struck one of the acorns too hard …

Hobnob lifted an eye to watch and scratched at the golden clutter topping his head. “What you doing?”

“Just watch,” Ray said. He began swinging the stone around in a circle above his head, building momentum. Then he extended the line farther, swinging it closer and closer to the hat. The hook hit the hat several times but never snagged.

Ray needed to try a different approach. This time, he swung the stone to land on the hat, hoping to catch it that way. It hit the far side with a thump.

“Careful!” Hobnob hissed. Ray inched the stone along until it met the hat. Continuing to pull slowly, he felt the broken twig catch the hat.

“You got it,” Hobnob whispered. “Keep pulling.”

Not wanting to lose the hold, he gingerly slid the hat across the acorn tops. Just as it was a few feet away, the twig came out.

“Tarnal!” Hobnob cursed. “Can you reach it?”

Ray pulled the lodestone back and saw that something was stuck to its side. It was a brown acorn. That was odd. All the other acorns surrounding the Devil’s oak were a distinctive cinder color.

“It’s right there. Can’t you get it?” Hobnob complained.

“Hold on,” Ray said. “Look.”

He pulled the acorn off the lodestone and felt the magnetic tug that had held them together.

“Put it down,” Hobnob urged.

“Didn’t you say the key was in one of the acorns? This acorn’s magnetic.” He tapped it a few times to the lodestone, each time feeling the connection. Then he gave the acorn a little shake. “There’s something inside it.”

“How do you know?”

Ray began squeezing the acorn in his palm.

Hobnob leaped to his feet in alarm. “No, you tarnal idiot!”

Ray felt the acorn crack.

Hobnob winced. “Once you open your palms you got about two seconds. I give myself three.”

Ray held his breath as he unfolded his fingers. Lying in his palm, along with the broken shell of the acorn, was a tiny iron key. He held it up for Hobnob to see. Hobnob’s face broke into an amazed smile.

“Can’t believe it! That’s luck.”

Ray palmed the key and swiveled his arm back. “I’ll throw it to you.”

“No!” Hobnob pleaded. “No. You en’t going to make it. Just … just put it on the stone and swing it over on the rope.”

Sticking the key to the lodestone and tucking the tiny handle beneath the knot for good measure, Ray swung the key across the acorns to Hobnob. Hobnob grabbed it and took the key from the lodestone.