Free The Secret of the Swamp King by Jonathan Rogers Page B

the wilderness was to keep it wild.
    Aidan was so lost in his own thoughts he paid no attention to the rhythmic squeaking he heard to the east. The forest, after all, was full of squeaks and chirps at all hours of the day and night. Floyd was the first to realize that these weren’t the noises of frogs and birds. He stopped and cupped a hand to his ear. “Is that wagon wheels I hear?” Aidan and Massey stopped, too, and they heard the jangle of a mule harness. They ran the short distance to the trail. They couldn’t see the wagon, but they could still hear it creaking northward toward civilization.
    â€œWait!” shouted Massey as they sprinted up the trail. They couldn’t let these travelers get away; it might be days before anyone else came along this remote path. “Hold on!”
    â€œWait for us,” called Floyd.
    The creaking of wagon wheels stopped. The wagoner had obviously heard them. When Aidan, Massey, and Floyd came running around the next bend in the trail, they skidded to a stop, shocked to find four sunburned men in buckskin breeches standing behind a wagon and aiming crossbows at them. Their eyes had the blank look of men who knew what it was to pull the trigger on another man. But the really mesmerizing thing about themen was their enormous hair. It stood high on their heads and flipped back like great duck wings, plastered with potato starch on either side. It was the past year’s fashionable hairstyle in Tambluff.
    Aidan and his fellow travelers instinctively raised their arms and froze where they stood. The mule stamped at the sandy ground and jingled in his traces, and a rain frog chirrripped from a bush beside the trail, but there was no other sound in the tense moment.
    A fifth man, tall with a curling mustache, leaned on the side of the wagon. He was obviously their leader. He had the biggest hair of all. His elbow rested on a burlap-wrapped bale, about the height and width of a small breakfast table. He squinted at Aidan, and his mouth twitched slightly beneath his bristling mustache, but he didn’t say anything.
    Massey’s surprise soon gave way to indignation. “What is this?” he demanded. “Why are you pointing those things at us like we was enemies or criminals?”
    The lead wagoner seemed satisfied that Aidan and company were unarmed. He gestured for his men to lower their weapons. “In the forrrest,” he explained, addressing Massey, “you can’t be too keerrrful.” In the man’s speech, Aidan noticed the rolling r ’s of Corenwald’s hill country dialect.
    Floyd noticed it too. “You boys ain’t from around here, are you?” he asked. He observed the shiny red of deep sunburn on their cheeks and noses, and the insect bites that dotted every inch of skin not covered in buckskin, and he couldn’t resist a little dig. “EasternWilderness can be pretty mean on a bunch of hill-scratchers.”
    One of the crossbowmen, taking offense, leveled his weapon at Floyd’s chest, but his leader reined him in again. “I rrreckon we’re plenty mean ourrr own selves,” he said with a hint of menace.
    Massey paid little attention to the stranger’s remark. There were a lot of tough talkers in the Eastern Wilderness. Massey was pretty tough himself, and he hadn’t given up hope that these strangers would be of assistance. “The reason we flagged you down,” he said, “was because we need some help.” The lead wagoner said nothing but merely stared at Massey. Massey carried on. “We was floating a raft of timber down the Tam to Last Camp and beached it on a sandbar. We’d be obliged if you could help us get it back into the water.”
    The mustachioed stranger paused before answering. “I don’t rrreckon we can. We got to get wherrre we going.”
    Floyd and Massey were astonished. “That ain’t how we do things in the wilderness!”