On Kingdom Mountain Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  THE DUCHESS OF KINGDOM MOUNTAIN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  HENRY

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  THE FAR SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  ON KINGDOM MOUNTAIN

  43

  44

  45

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2007 by Howard Frank Mosher

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Mosher, Howard Frank.

  On Kingdom Mountain / Howard Frank Mosher.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-19723-1

  ISBN-10: 0-618-19723-0

  1. Treasure troves—Fiction. 2. Vermont—

  Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.0884406 2007

  813'.54—dc22 2006023568

  eISBN 978-0-547-52603-4

  v1.0714

  To Phillis

  Prologue

  IN THE LATE SUMMER of the last full year of the bloodiest war in American history, two men in butternut uniforms rode hard into the northern Vermont village of Kingdom Common, yelling and firing their rifles into the air. They galloped across the short north end of the rectangular central green, scattering a gang of kids playing one old cat on the grass under the tall New England elms, waking up the old men dozing on the porch of the Common Hotel. While one man held the horses, the other ran into the squat brick First Farmers and Lumberers Bank of Kingdom Common and demanded, in what a clerk later characterized as a “Rebel-sounding” accent, all of the gold on hand. He stipulated that he wanted only gold, the clerk remembered. Besides his rifle and two holstered pistols, he had eight white linen sacks for the clerks to fill. He made eight trips back outside to the horses, staggering under the weight of each sack. His companion, in the meantime, continued to holler and spout all kinds of threats, damning the Union army in general and Vermont Yankees in particular, and firing his rifle at random intervals. To this day there is a pock-mark the size of a half-dollar partway up the granite clock tower of the courthouse, presumably from one of the stray bullets fired by the cursing raider.

  The Gray Ghosts, as the two riders would become known in the mythology of Kingdom County, were not long at their work. At most, the robbery took ten minutes. No one had any idea who they were. They might have been Confederate soldiers hoping to divert Union forces to the north or common bandits disguised as Confederate soldiers. Still shouting, they galloped east out of town on the county road, then, it was thought, up the Canada Pike Road over Kingdom Mountain toward the border, five miles to the north. By the time the sheriff, a seventy-year-old Mexican War veteran who, at the time of the raid, was playing checkers at the feed store at the other end of town, had assembled a posse of other graybeards too old for active service and teenage boys too young, the raiders had a good half-hour start. Beyond the border, the pike road was just a faint trace, scarcely more than an animal trail through big woods and trackless bogs and bigger woods still, some of the last true wilderness east of the Rocky Mountains. It was not surprising that the Ghosts got away with their plunder scot-free.

  The legend of the Great Kingdom Common Raid, however, was considerably enhanced by two unusual circumstances. First, the nondescript little country bank happened to be one of the wealthiest in northern New England, owing to the deposits of a number of local farmers who had paid substitutes to go to war in their stead and had made huge profits selling provender to sutlers to feed Union soldiers and horses. Astonishingly, the estimated take from the robbery was just under one hundred thousand dollars, all in double-eagle twenty-dollar gold pieces.

  Second, so far as anyone could determine, neither of the rifle-toting raiders was ever heard from again, either north or south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Except for a few stray gold coins on the lower reaches of the pike road, not far from the Kinneson homestead, all traces of the riders, their horses, and the stolen gold seemed to vanish from the earth, leaving nothing but the legend of the treasure. The Treasure of Kingdom Mountain.

  THE DUCHESS OF KINGDOM MOUNTAIN

  1

  MISS JANE HUBBELL KINNESON had lived all her life on Kingdom Mountain. Like her father before her, she enjoyed the reputation of being relentlessly old-fashioned. Winter and summer she wore long black dresses made from homespun wool. In the days when she was still farming, she worked her fields with oxen. She still raised most of her own food, and even Miss Jane’s manner of expressing herself was old-fashioned. She delighted in using the antique phrases of her father and his Scottish ancestors, calling the brooks on her mountain “burns,” the valleys “glens,” and the trout “char.” During her years as mistress of the Kinnesonville schoolhouse, when families with children still lived on Kingdom Mountain, she referred to the students as her scholars. In recent years she had operated a small bookshop and lending library in the village, which she called the Atheneum, open three afternoons and one evening a week.

  For the word “certain,” Miss Jane often said “determined.” “I’m not entirely determined what to do with you scholars, but I shall give you fair warning. I won’t abide slothfulness in the young.” “Abide” was another of Miss Jane’s favorite expressions. And she loved the word “vex” to denote a frame of mind just this side of anger. “Class, you are late in from recess again. How many times must I tell you that in this short life punctuality is all? Sometimes you vex me beyond human endurance.”

  As the sole proprietor and last resident of Kingdom Mountain, Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson was vexed, and mightily so, by anyone who presumed to interfere in her affairs there. She was vexed by King James the First, whom she held personally responsible for the King James Bible. She was also vexed, though perhaps only mildly, by her title in the village, where she was known as the Duchess of Kingdom Mountain. Most of all, in the late winter of 1930, she was vexed by the proposed highway that would cut directly over the top of her mountain, linking Kingdom County and the rest of Vermont with the Eastern Townships of Quebec and Montreal.

  Most Commoners, as the villagers called themselves in those days, referred to the new road as the Connector. Miss Jane called it the high road, no one was sure why. Maybe this was another of her beloved Kinneson anachronisms. Or perhaps she thought of the Connector as the high road because it would pass mainly through elevated terrain, skirting the river valleys where the villages and more prosperous farms were located. Then again, she may have wished to distinguish it from the tangled network of country lanes and dirt roads linking the hill farms and upland hamlets of the county one to another in the roundabout manner of
the Kingdom of that era, where a straight line was almost never the shortest distance between two points. This much was certain: there would be nothing circuitous about the Connector. And there was no doubt at all that the proposed highway was a vexation Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson would not abide.

  Yet the Duchess was as unpredictable as she was stubborn. At the public hearing for the Connector at the Kingdom Common town hall, she listened to other farmers whose land would be confiscated inveigh against change in general and the new road in particular. She listened to her cousin Eben Kinneson Esquire, the wealthiest man in Kingdom County and the chief attorney for the highway project, present plans and maps and assure landowners that every effort had been made to route the Connector through higher, less valuable terrain. When her cousin Charles Kinneson, the editor of the Kingdom County Monitor, pointed out that the Kingdom’s hill farmers valued their high mowings and mountain meadows as much as the valley farmers valued their river-bottom land, Miss Jane merely pursed her lips. Maybe she knew that protesting would do no good. Even as she sat in the little town hall listening to the debate, the right of way for the high road was unspooling northeast from the Common with something of the inexorableness of the glacier that, ten thousand years before, had carved out the hills and valleys of what would become northern Vermont. The hill farmers’ best hope now, their last hope, really, was that the Duchess, who for decades had held sway over Kingdom Mountain like a Russian empress, and whose words at town meeting still caused grown men whom she had taught as boys to quake in their boots, would speak for them. Wasn’t Miss Jane widely believed to have second sight? Perhaps she would prophesy some magnificent catastrophe if the township went ahead with the Connector.

  At last Jane rose. Tall and slender, with long, light hair and wide-set gray eyes, still a strikingly attractive woman at nearly fifty, she stepped into the sloping wooden aisle of the hall where, some thirty years earlier, she had delivered her high school valedictory, a scathing denunciation of small-town complacency and provincialism that had shocked the entire room into a prolonged and stunned silence. But instead of the expected denunciation of progress she said only, in her usual direct manner, “I can plainly see that in this instance we shall have to render unto Caesar what’s his. In Vermont, at least, this high road will go where it has a mind to go.”

  While Eben Kinneson Esquire and the town fathers probably did not much relish being compared to a Roman dictator, it was with evident relief that Eben said, “We appreciate your willingness to understand our situation, cousin. Particularly in your case, where this is such a personal matter. Of course we, I mean we the town, will take care to cross your mountain at the very farthest remove from your house and fields.”

  “You the town will do no such thing,” Miss Jane said. “I said, in Vermont the high road will go where it wishes. Kingdom Mountain is not in Vermont. Nor is it in Canada. It is an entity unto itself, every square foot of which belongs to me.”

  “Cousin, as I’m sure you know, that notion has long since—”

  “Hear me well, sir,” Miss Jane interrupted. “If I spy you or any of your legions on my mountain, I’ll defend it by whatever means are necessary.”

  It is difficult to say how such a declaration might have been greeted elsewhere. With applause, maybe. In the town hall of Kingdom Common on that long-ago March evening, Miss Jane’s announcement was met with solemn nods of satisfaction. Eben Kinneson Esquire said nothing more. But not a soul in the room doubted that the battle for Kingdom Mountain had been joined.

  2

  MANY TIMES OVER the years it had occurred to Miss Jane that waking up in her downstairs bedchamber at the home place was like waking up in a tale by the Brothers Grimm. In the pale dawn light of her fiftieth birthday, on the morning after the hearing at the town hall, she looked out into her kitchen workshop and saw the profiles of her beloved blockheads, Memphre Magog and the Loup-Garou, standing vigil on either side of the door to the porch. She could also make out the shapes of some of the individual birds in her Birds in Strife tableau. Hanging from the ceiling on a slender wire was a sparrow hawk with a limp bluebird in its claws. Nearby depended a red-tailed hawk and a great horned owl, their talons locked in midair combat. Her sharp-shinned hawk was busy defeathering a dead tree sparrow on the windowsill above the soapstone sink. Miss Jane’s favorite piece in Birds in Strife was just coming into relief in the early light. It was a northern shrike, carved in the act of impaling a redpoll on the pointed spike of a thorn-apple branch nailed to the wall above her workbench. Strife, Miss Jane thought, was the way of all birds, and the way of the world as well. John James Audubon had understood that. Many of his best paintings depicted birds in strife. Jackson and Santiago, on the other hand, hardly ever carved birds in combat. Worse yet, they etched in the feathers before painting their birds instead of after, thereby clogging the pinion grooves with paint. Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson took great pride in being the first bird carver to etch in the pinions after she painted. The effect was strikingly lifelike.

  Jane sat up and put on her long johns and her red-and-black-checked wool pants, two wool shirts, and two pairs of wool stockings. She padded into the kitchen in her stocking feet, tossed some kindling from the woodbox onto the banked coals in the Glenwood, and washed up under the long-handled metal pump at the sink. The sky in the west was still quite dark. She could make out Orion, locally known as the Voyageur du Nord, about to take a long stride over Jay Peak before disappearing. The Voyageur was a promising sign: a clear day ahead for her birthday adventure.

  The oatmeal Miss Jane had kept simmering in a double boiler on the back of her Glenwood all night was a little gluey, but oatmeal stayed with a body until dinnertime. Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson had eaten her breakfast oatmeal out of the same bowl, white with a blue rim, every morning for nearly fifty years, sitting at the foot of the applewood kitchen table astride the bold yellow line painted down the middle of the floor to represent the international boundary that Kingdom Mountain Kinnesons had ignored for generations. As usual, she ate with one foot in Canada and one in the United States, though the mountain, as she had reminded her neighbors the night before, belonged to neither country. The yellow line was a Kinneson family joke. The border did not exist when her great-great-grandfather, Venturing Seth Kinneson, first came to Kingdom Mountain, pulling in the yoke with his near ox while the off ox, which had cut its foot on jagged ice on the river, limped along behind. To Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, and to many other residents of the Kingdom in that era, the border still did not exist.

  Thinking about her ancestors reminded Miss Jane of her eighteenth birthday. Hurriedly, she reached for her father’s GAR canteen and poured a stiff jolt of Who Shot Sam into her coffee. Then she stepped into On Kingdom Mountain to report the results of last night’s meeting to her dear people.

  Like her beloved blockheads, Jane’s dear people, though life-size, had an otherworldly aspect. Their heads were oblong, their features painted rather than carved, and their eyes were Jane’s own wide-set gray Kinneson eyes. There they all were: Venturing Seth and his son Freethinker; her grandfather Quaker Meeting; Uncle Pilgrim, with his long staff in the shape of two intertwined serpents; her father, Morgan, as a young man; and Jane’s mother, Pharaoh’s Daughter, swaddled in a red Hudson’s Bay blanket in the sweetgrass basket in which Quaker Meeting had discovered her as an infant in the ox manger of the barn one Christmas morning.

  “Well,” Jane announced, “we have met the enemy. I wouldn’t say they’re ours yet. But they know they have a formidable adversary.”

  Jane’s parlor off the kitchen, On Kingdom Mountain, was a retreat where she could be entirely frank, with her dear people and with herself. Despite her admirable public presence the night before, Miss Jane had been feeling rather melancholy lately. It was not just the proposed high road that had caused the Duchess to find herself at sixes and sevens, as she had recently put it to her dear people. She was also troubled by her failure to win first prize in the North A
merican Bird Carving Contest, not to mention the question of her future on the mountain. Though Jane was as healthy as her own oxen, fifty was not forty, much less thirty, and she really had no clear plan for the future.

  “Half a century,” Jane mused to her people. It scarcely seemed possible. Time, no doubt, to take stock of one’s life. What would she do when she could no longer get by on her remote mountain, with no running water, no electricity, and no children or other close family to help? While Jane blamed only herself and her Kinneson pride for not having a husband and family of her own, her self-indictment was of little consolation this morning.

  Then there was the dilemma of the Atheneum. The building, which belonged to the town, was sadly dilapidated. The nails clinching the roof slates in place were rusting out, and several times lately Miss Jane had heard the fingernail-on-a-blackboard screech of a slate pulling loose and skittering down the steep slope, thudding on the grass or shattering to fragments on the long granite steps of the library. The ridgeline sagged from the tremendous weight of the slates over the years. In places the stone foundation had heaved out of true. The Atheneum needed painting, outdoors and in, and the flagstone fireplace needed to be repointed. With the county and the entire country in the depths of the Great Depression, it was unlikely that money would be available for repairs anytime soon. A new highway to bring tourists and jobs was one thing. A library and bookshop was something else.

  Jane poured another finger of the beautiful amber-colored Who Shot Sam into her empty coffee cup and tossed it off neat. She believed she could taste, in her hundred-proof homemade twenty-apple applejack, the distinct flavor of each of the varieties she and her father had grafted to the Northern Spy in the dooryard—Duchess of Oldenburg, Westfield Seek No Further, Red Astrachan, Wealthy, Cortland, Alexander, and all of her other favorites.