Skavenger's Hunt by Mike Rich

Author:Mike Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkshares
Published: 2017-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

The Door and the Pair of Fathoms

IT WAS STILL barely dawn, and yet it felt like they’d been up a full day. The bone-chilling twenty minutes they’d all just experienced together had made sure of that.

Exactly when the four of them should get off the train had turned out to be a tricky decision of its own, especially after Grace’s warning.

But while the thought of emerging from the big cavern of boxes wasn’t appealing at all, the kids also knew they couldn’t just stay on the train. Eventually they crawled out, thinking it smart to get outside while a good many disembarking travelers were still there to provide cover. Grace had promised it would be a waste of time for the youngsters to look for the Dark Men; and sure enough, they didn’t see any of them.

They did, however, find George the porter, absent for the past terrifying twenty minutes, frantically searching for them in the crowd of busy passengers and piles of steamer trunks.

Mattie didn’t want George worrying too much, so even though they were still shaken by the morning’s events, she’d simply told him that they’d gone back to explore the caboose for a while.

The four of them then thanked George for all his help and said their good-byes. They repeated the same story they’d told him a few days earlier: that they were meeting relatives in St. Louis and he needn’t worry about them further.

It was a fairly short excursion from the train station to the levees of the booming Missouri port city, filled within the last few years with wide-rutted dirt roads and squatty, quickly built structures.

It was in St. Louis that they hoped Skavenger had planted his next riddle, even though they all knew the stop stood a very good chance of being their most dangerous one yet. The checklist of things they had to keep in mind was getting longer by the minute. The Dark Men were following their every move, they’d been threatened in New York by twin adult men, and their next clue might be two fathoms underwater.

Ernie, whose head spun around like an owl all morning in search of Grace, said they needed to at least have a talk about whether they really, really, really wanted to walk right up to the not-exactly-discreet location awaiting them.

But Jack put an end to that conversation before it even got started. To heck with Doubt and his crazy Dark Men, he’d said. They’d come halfway across the country and they weren’t about to turn back now. Once they solved the next clue, they’d just do a better job of hiding from them. Mattie agreed in an instant.

Henry had been struck by her response.

He remembered how calm she’d seemed that night at the Vanderbilt Estate, even though—he knew now—she’d just encountered the Dark Men. Out of sight, out of mind was how Mattie seemed to deal with problems.

With Jack and Mattie so firm in their conviction, there was nothing to do but keep to the plan.

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