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He was halfway through the journal when a woman suddenly appeared on the pages. Brendan Pope had taken a wife. A Chickasaw woman named Cries A Lot, and according to the journal, the woman started off as part of a trade.
Cries A Lot had been traveling with a mountain man, who rode off and left her at the trading post with Brendan because, after she saw the big Scotsman, she wanted nothing more to do with the trapper. Brendan Pope’s size fascinated her. He was the tallest man she’d ever seen. She told him she would stay with him because she liked the sound of his laugh, but only if he didn’t beat her. And it was obvious through the ensuing posts, that she became a huge part of Brendan Pope’s world.
He loved her, and he called her Meg.
As Nyles continued to read, the years passed. Brendan’s posts were less frequent. He was busy with his work and his family. He and Meg had six sons andone daughter. There was one single line in the journal that mentioned the little girl dying from a snakebite when she was only six.
But as he read through the continuing years that passed, the six sons grew up and claimed their own land up on the mountain. They had their mother’s black hair and their father’s great size. Four of the boys married daughters of nearby settlers. Another son married a Chickasaw woman, and another married a Cherokee, and they all lived on their homesteads up on the mountain, and that was their life.
But then the journal posts began reflecting the changing times.
Brendan’s trading post shifted into a dry goods store, and a blacksmith by the name of Liam Cauley set up shop nearby, and another man named Alfred Glass opened a saloon, and they named their outpost, Jubilee, and their sons and daughters grew up and married and built cabins like the Popes, until the mountain above Jubilee had a larger population than the little settlement below, and when a traveling preacher came through, they built him a church on the mountain. He named it the Church in the Wildwood, and so he stayed.
Nyles was mesmerized. He could see Brendan and Meg’s tragedies noted by two or three words. The births, the deaths. Battling weather and thieves, and it was obvious by omission that no one on that mountain was aware there was a civil war brewing in the states beyond, and if they were, they took no claim in it.
Nyles paused long enough to make some coffee,snagged a sweet roll from the pantry, and was back to reading a post from 1864, when he saw the wordsConfederate soldiersand something about a troop coming through the settlement pulling a wagon rumored to be carrying Confederate gold.
But Brendan only mentioned it in passing, because his main post on that day was that his Meg had gone to the nearby creek to pick berries and never came home. Thinking about those soldiers and worried about her safety, he’d locked up the store, gathered up their sons and some friends, and headed for the creek. They found signs of her berry picking and followed her trail up the mountain, all the way to a place known as the “Big Falls.”
They found her berry basket upturned, the highbush blackberries she’d been picking were scattered about, and a large amount of blood was on the ground, as well as the prints of her little moccasins in the crushed berries.
And all over the ground around them were at least a dozen different sets of boot prints. Panicked, Brendan and the searchers began following them. They soon realized there were two sets of prints. One coming to the falls, and a second set going out the same way. They followed them all the way back to the trail.
There, they found the Confederate wagon with a shattered wheel and empty of any cargo. There were signs that the soldiers had gone into the woods, only to come back out later and ride away. But there was no sign of Meg. No more little moccasin footprints. Nosign of more blood. No sign of her anywhere. It was as if she’d vanished into thin air.
By now, Nyles was in tears. The little Chickasaw woman was gone, and he felt Brendan Pope’s heartbreak and rage as the story continued. Brendan and his sons followed the soldiers’ trail over the pass, only to come upon their bodies. Some had been shot. Some had died in hand-to-hand combat. But there was no sign of who they’d fought with, or why. It was almost as if they’d gotten into an argument and killed each other. Whatever they might have known had died with them.
Brendan was miles and miles from home, and with no other trail to follow, he was forced to give up the search. He rode back to Jubilee, grieving the loss of a wife who’d disappeared from his life as unexpectedly as she’d first appeared. The posts ended with Meg’s disappearance, and later, in someone else’s handwriting, mention of Brendan’s death in 1870 and being buried at the cemetery behind the church.
But this was where Nyles’s focus shifted. It had gone from Brendan and Meg’s world to that shipment of Confederate gold. The broken wagon wheel meant they could no longer transport it. And the trail of boot prints leading from the wagon and into the woods was most likely the soldiers taking the gold into the woods to hide, intending to come back for it later. They musthave stumbled upon Meg and her berries, and since she would have been a witness to their cargo, they couldn’t afford to let her live, right?
Maybe they hid the gold and her body in the same place? If they saw Meg at Big Falls, then the hiding place must have been nearby. He knew Kentucky was rife with caves. What if he could find that cave? And what if that gold was still there? At that point, Nyles wrapped up the journal, went to bed, and dreamed of treasure hunting for gold.
He was already making plans as he got ready for work the next morning. He gave himself a long look in the mirror, trying to decide how he was going to make this work, and then decided he needed a disguise. He already had long hair he could dye, but he needed a beard to hide his face, and there was no time like the present to start growing it.
Once he got to work, he used his lunchtime to research the geography of that area of the Cumberland Mountains and was curious to see if Jubilee had ever made it onto a map. His shock came in finding out that not only was Jubilee still there, but it had become a huge tourist attraction all on its own. And further research gave him yet more startling results.
The mountain was populated by the descendants of the Pope, Cauley, and Glass families. He didn’t yet know how, but he knew he was going there, just not as Nyles Fairchild.
A few days later, after setting up leave from work, hewent to his bank to add a fictitious cousin named Dirk Conrad to access his checking account.
The bank employee was helpful and agreeable, and added the name.
“You will need to have your cousin come into the bank in person to sign the authorization slip,” the employee said.
“Yes, I’ll tell him. He should be arriving within the week,” Nyles said, and exited the bank.
Once he took off work, he bought a bottle of temporary color rinse and turned himself into a blond and began coloring his white whiskers along with his hair. Then he bought a hiker-style backpack, a camping shovel for digging, and a metal detector that could be broken down for packing. At that point, he was really into the game.
He knew a guy who knew a guy and, for a small amount of money, wound up with a fake driver’s license for his new look. Nyles was pumped. Creating a new identity was like being reborn.
He went into the bank in full disguise, signed the authorization slip, got a personalized debit card in Dirk Conrad’s name, and then, at the last moment, realized the license tag on his car was still registered to Fairchild. Dirk Conrad couldn’t be seen in Nyles Fairchild’s car, so he solved the problem by renting a car under his alias at a rental company in a suburb of Alexandria, bought car insurance through the rental company, and went home to pack.
Two days later, Dirk Conrad was in Jubilee, checking into Hotel Devon. The next day he went into search mode, driving up the road on Pope Mountain only to discover NOTRESPASSINGsigns all over it.
Shit. No hiking allowed?
The woods hid those who dwelled upon the mountain, but he could tell by the number of mailboxes and dirt roads winding up into the trees, the population did not bode well for sneaking or trespassing.
