Jake's Justice, Book Three of Wizards Read Online Free PDF Page B

farmer with hoard of treasure on his land – not found .
    What seemed to me like eons ago, I used to help worried relatives find missing hikers. It didn’t happen every day, but more often than you might think. Unfortunately, by the time such people came knocking at my door, their children, lovers, etcetera were usually dead. I would borrow an item that belonged to the missing person and throw it down my hopscotch court where it would hop to wherever they were. Then I could follow. Back in those days I need a court to hop. These days the court was in my mind.
    I’ve learnt a lot about magic since then. However, though I wouldn’t need the court, I’d still need something they had owned recently to find them. How did I do it for a gold hoard though? What I needed to do was to examine some examples.
    Do you know what happens when you turn on your computer after over a month of leaving it off? Neither did I. It was past noon before my laptop stopped plaguing me with update messages and demands I reboot. A quick search showed that there was a hoard being shown in Birmingham , which was lucky because I had been to the museum in question.
    It would have been better if I could have held the large bundle of coins inside the display case. However, I felt I’d seen enough. Returning to my room I tossed an imaginary set of ancient gold coins down an imaginary hopscotch court and as it vanished, I followed, metal detector in hand.
    I arrived in a herd of cows with my feet descending into the warm stinking matter of a fresh cowpat. Hopping a few feet away I cursed as my socks were soaked, along with the shoes and the bottom of my jeans. Magic is good for some things and the stinking goo and liquid vanished, though my toes still felt unusually warm. The cows were uninterested in my colorful curses and after taking off a shoe to confirm my toes were not marinating in manure I calmed down enough to look around.
    The field looked pretty much like any other field. There were farm buildings in the distance. An ugly corrugated metal building was the biggest thing in sight. The sun was shining and flies buzzed around me and the cow pat I’d landed in. It looked to be the only one in the vicinity and was easy to distinguish anyway, given the two perfect footprints in the center of it. After some quick detectoring it was clear that the only signal I could find was dead center below the pat. It would be the work of a moment to remove it, but on the other hand it did provide a very visible marker of ground zero, so I let it stay.
    I trudged through the field towards the big ugly shed. What I needed was the farmer who owned the land and that looked to be the most likely place to find him.
     
      “You be wanting somethin’?”
    Apparently I’d hopped out of Wales as that was a distinctly English accent.
    “I’d like to use my metal detector in your fields.”
    The farmer groaned as he stood up from the cow he’d been examining. “Do you hear that, Betty? Young man here wants to find all the nails we’ve dropped over the years.”
    I thought he was talking to the cow until a tinkling laugh came from somewhere deeper in the shed.
    “We’ve never found anything, have we Dad?” a pleasant sounding female voice replied.
    “Not for the four generations our families have farmed this land,” the Farmer continued. “But he’s Welsh judging from the accent and probably thinks the fields of England are filled with gold.”
    “If cow muck’s gold, he could be right,” Betty agreed.
    The Farmer straightened up and looked me in the eye. “And what’s in it for me, if that mine detector of yours finds anything?”
    “You get to keep any land mines I find?” I suggested. Again, a hidden tinkling laugh followed my words.
    “Let him, Dad. What’s harm’s he going to do?”
    Her father was staring aggressively at me and I tried a simpler tactic.
    “It’s fifty-fifty. If I find anything we split the profit right down the