Ollie Come Free by Timothy Patrick

Author:Timothy Patrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: family saga, brain injury, vietnam, special needs, savant, disabilities, struck by lightning, treasure cave, island of genius, romance for disabled
Publisher: Country Scribbler Publishing

Chapter 14

Jubal Wainwright had stashed twelve hundred gold coins somewhere on the ranch. And Jubal was a weird man. This combination of facts created problems at the time of the robbery in 1887 and continued to create problems down through the years. Which of Jubal’s bizarre behaviors in the days before and after the crime pointed to the treasure, and deserved to be chased down, and which of them had simply been the meaningless meanderings of a strange duck?

The sheriff’s account of the robbery contained a laundry list of oddities, but one in particular stood out from the others. A few weeks before the robbery, Jubal slid his line shack onto a makeshift sled, hitched it up to his horse, and dragged it four hundred yards down the hill. And, after setting up the shack in the new location, he covered up every indication that it had ever been in the previous location. Was this something, or was it nothing? The sheriff and the insurance company thought it was something. They believed that Jubal had hidden the treasure somewhere up the hill and had tried to deflect attention away from it. The theory had sideways logic with a touch of crazy, and it fit Jubal perfectly. But after a hundred years of futility and ten thousand holes in the ground, Bob had his doubts.

That’s not to say that the shack still didn’t have something to say—if the listener could just open his ears and clear his mind. Sometimes Bob and Ralph rode up to the site of the old shack, parked their butts for an hour or two, and tried to think like strange stagecoach robbers. During one of these sessions Bob remembered that something besides the shack had been removed all those years ago: Jubal had chopped down a sycamore tree to build the sled. This fact had been noted in the sheriff’s report, and a police photograph from the time showed a single tree stump on an otherwise bald hilltop. From these few simple observations Bob developed a wild theory (by then most theories tended to be wild because all of the practical ones had been used up) which he bounced off of Ralph one day after work while they rode side by side back to the barn.

“Why do you suppose he chopped down the whole tree when he only needed a couple of good sized branches?”

“Maybe he needed firewood.”

“He limbed it, scattered the leftover branches, and rolled the trunk down the hill. He never chopped firewood.”

“Maybe he just didn’t think it through,” said Ralph.

“Or maybe he needed to get rid of the tree.”

“Why?”

“Because if someone climbed the tree, they would have seen something they weren’t supposed to see,” said Bob.

“Uh…OK. But then why did he move the shack?

“Same reason. The shack sat up off the ground, on top of the hill…maybe you could see things….” Bob’s voice petered out.

“Umm…it’s a little thin, Buck, but at least it’s not hard to test. There are trees up there now.”

“Think you can climb them?” asked Bob.

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