I know that you are rooted in Ohio and that perhaps you have a family now and a bright, happy life you would be hard put to abandon. But perhaps not. Perhaps something of our father’s restlessness, which I seem to have inherited in disproportion, is also at work in your heart. If so, I offer you and yours a chance for a new beginning, and the guarantee of something exceedingly curious that will stir your excellent mind. If not, then I still ask you, as my brother, to consider coming.
It is not an easy task I set for you. It is a long and difficult route and not without danger. Yet I still ask. Come, Hephaestus. Beyond my own selfish desire to share something of this life with you before I am gone, I have a suspicion that if you were to take up residence on this property and hold it you would find that it holds more value than I can speak of here. I have enclosed what money I have to offer to help you afford the journey, or to use as you see fit. Set out as soon as you can if you are able, or forget me and carry on with your life with my blessings.
MJS
PS. You may inquire of me at the trading station in Perryton and head south to the Canadian River. A man named Bloxcomb will assist you.
CHAPTER 3
The Necessity of Adventure
HEPHAESTUS CONFIRMED THAT BOTH THE LETTER AND THE MAP were evidence of his brother’s handwriting. None of the Sitturds could sleep or eat (which was just as well, because there was precious little for the pot). The proposition that the letter advanced, with its combination of familial support and an invitation to adventure, was, in their current state of finances and mind, irresistible. Still, it left them with what Rapture could not stop describing as a “big’un recishun!”
Despite their avowed intention of mulling over the matter in detail, come the next morning, by the time Rapture had prepared their daily dose of tansy bitters to keep off the ague, Micah’s proposal had been embraced by the whole family with the unquestioning conviction that desperation can bring. There was no “recishun” to be made. They had to leave Zanesville. That Texas lay a long distance away, and a war with Mexico could break out any day, did not dissuade them. This was an offer and a request that could not be refused. Not in their present circumstances—and not in Hephaestus’s heart, either. There was about the communication a suggestive timeliness and a hint of redemptive possibility that hooked him as cleanly as the sturgeon he used to pull from the head of the falls.
With a door of refuge open, it was their lot “ta tek ’e foot een ’e han,” as Rapture put it (which was not a concept that Lloyd thought was sound from an engineering point of view). What to try to salvage was not so clear. The gold that Micah had sent was sufficient to cover only the debts they felt most honor-bound to pay, and, given the financial claims their neighbors wanted to impose upon them, removing any of their remaining possessions would technically have been stealing. None of their farm animals would make it out of Ohio except the draft horse Pegasus, and the one suitable vehicle was an old humdinger night-soil wagon that Hephaestus had traded for a pile of corncob coal. The wagon had been airing out among the snares and spring-loaded traps of Lloyd’s minefield maze garden all winter, but it still retained a pungency that announced its history well before arrival. No matter. If embarking on a journey to a promised land (however “sabbidge” and under threat) had to be started in a cart that reeked of dung, so be it. Better to risk life, limb, and olfactory discomfort than remain in Zanesville as outcasts and debtors.
They considered rafting down the Muskingum to its intersection with the Ohio River at Marietta and catching a steamboat to Louisville and then St. Louis (if they could earn some money along the way). Hephaestus could get work in the cities, and with any luck they could save enough to take a steamboat along the Missouri River to somewhere like Independence and head south across the wild Indian country from there. But the Muskingum was a difficult river to navigate in spring, running high with ice melt and prone to flood, plus