Jug Rock – Present Day
We parked on the edge of Albright Lane, just beyond the faded sign
welcoming visitors to “The Largest Free-Standing Table Rock Formation East of
the Mississippi.” The woods were quiet, the kind of quiet that makes you feel
like you’re being watched—by squirrels, ghosts, or memories. Hard to say.
Jug Rock stood alone like a stone sentinel, slightly off-kilter, like it
had been set there on purpose by something ancient and unseen.
Kate walked slowly around the formation, scanning the base.
“Most people just come here to take pictures and leave,” she said. “They
don’t bother to look at the rock’s foundation. But Ray always said the answers
were in what people ignored.”
I knelt, brushing away a layer of damp leaves. That’s when I saw it.
A faint symbol, carved low into the sandstone, nearly erased by time.
A triangle with a vertical slash down the middle. Beneath it, three small
dots arranged like a pyramid.
Kate’s breath caught. “That’s the mark I’ve seen before… but only in a
Civil War-era diary housed at the Shoals Library. It belonged to a man named Silas
Vickery, a Confederate courier who supposedly passed through this region
during the war.”
I stood and looked at her. “You have a copy?”
She nodded. “Not just a copy. I transcribed the whole thing five years
ago. There’s a passage that mentions ‘the stone that stands like a sentinel,
marked with the trinity flame.’ This has to be it.”
She opened her satchel and pulled out a printed transcript of Silas’s
diary, flipping to a marked page.
Journal of Silas Vickery – October 29,
1864
Somewhere near the White River, Indiana
“We passed through the river town they called Hindostan—now a shell. No
light in the windows, no prayer from the chapels. The sickness left behind only
whispers and bones. From there, we moved west, keeping the wagon covered and
the horses quiet.
At the great stone rising like a jug from the earth, I made the mark, as
instructed: the trinity flame. Our destination lies four turns past the bluff,
down the road of Dover. There we’ll leave it—in the earth, for the cause, or
for another future.
Should I fall, let this record guide the loyal hand. What was taken must
stay hidden until the light returns.”
Kate closed the binder slowly.
“He was talking about the Bluff of Beaver Bend. And ‘the road of
Dover’—that’s Dover Hill Road. Your uncle might’ve been following this trail
for decades.”
I looked at the mark again, running my fingers across the worn grooves.
“We’ve got one symbol. One landmark. And a journal written by a man who
thought the Civil War treasure belonged to the future.”
Kate pulled a piece of chalk from her bag and traced the symbol onto
black construction paper.
“One down,” she said. “Three to go.”
But I was still staring at the mark.
Something about it didn’t feel like it was guiding us to gold.
It felt like it was warning us away.
No comments:
Post a Comment