Sample text for On Kingdom Mountain / Howard Frank Mosher.
Bibliographic record and links to related information available from the Library of Congress catalog
Copyrighted sample text provided by the publisher and used with permission. May be incomplete or contain other coding.
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 pockmark 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.
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.
Copyright © 2007 by Howard Frank Mosher
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication:
Treasure troves -- Fiction.
Vermont -- Fiction.