Eliot nodded, his expression grim. "I'm listening."
The sharp-faced woman smirked, drawing the lines of her profile into a point. "Now, you're gonna need to go to the old thatcher's shop on the edge of town. Ask for Giles, and tell him 'the rooster crows before dawn'. He'll know what it means."
Eliot nodded, committing the phrase to memory. He pushed himself to his feet, swaying slightly as a wave of dizziness washed over him. He steadied himself against the wall, taking a deep breath.
"And Eliot," the woman called after him as he made his way to the door, "watch your back out there. These are dangerous times."
With that, she shooed Eliot out of the room, tossing his pants at him as he stumbled through the doorway.
Once again fully clothed, Eliot made his way through the winding streets, shielding his face from the glaring sun with one hand. The young man had been walking for more than a few minutes before realizing he had no idea where any of the thatcher shops were, let alone a specific old on on the edge of town. What did she even mean by the ‘edge’ of town? Did the coast count? Was the edge where the buildings stopped being close together or some far-flung building? Eliot had no idea, but the woman been all dramatic and ominous-like and now he felt too awkward to go back and ask.
After a bit of wandering Eliot found something that fit the description well enough. The building was ramshackle, its roof sagging and its walls in need of a fresh coat of paint. The sign above the door was too weathered to be sure, but he thought at least a bit of what was left of the smudged lettering said ‘roof’. Either that or hoof, and he didn’t see any horses.
Eliot pushed open the door, a small bell tinkling to announce his arrival. The interior of the shop was dim and musty, the air thick with the scent of dried reeds
“Is Giles in?” Eliot asked a man sitting behind a counter, reading a newspaper.
“No.”
Eliot just stood there for a second, mouth opening and closing as he thought about what to say.
“You need something?” the man asked upon flipping a page, “New roof maybe? Wouldn’t be the only one with what’s been going on in town.” The man creakily laughed at his own joke.
“The rooster crows before the dawn.” The young man stated, serious as could be.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
The old man looked at Eliot from over his paper and arched an eyebrow. “There rooster crows before the dawn?” The old man repeated back, and Eliot nodded, holding his ground under the gaze.
“Son, “ then man lowered his newspaper and gave Eliot his full consideration, “ are you on drugs?”
***
After a lengthy and somewhat circuitous conversation, Eliot eventually convinced the skeptical old man that he was not, in fact, under the influence of any illicit substances, nothing had fallen and hit him in the head, rather he was a determined bounty hunter on the trail of the notorious pirate Mad Dog Maddox. Still the old man didn’t seem convinced.
Eliot spoke of the unrest that gripped the town, the tyranny of the marines, the rebel threat, and the desperate hope that capturing Mad Dog Maddox might bring some measure of peace.
The old man listened, his weathered face inscrutable, his eyes sharp and assessing beneath bushy brows. Eliot could feel the weight of that gaze, could sense the calculations and judgments being made. He met the man's scrutiny with a steady resolve, willing him to see the determination that burned beneath the surface.
“You’re drunk, ain’t ya?”
“I-,” exasperated, hungover, and just about done trying to get through to the old man, Eliot admitted, “Maybe a little?”
“Knew it was something.” The man nodded, finally satisfied, “So you want To get at the Mad Dog?”
Eliot nodded, almost unbelieving he was getting anywhere with this.
With a heavy sigh, the old man relented, pulling out a scrap of paper and a stub of a pencil. His gnarled hands moved with surprising deftness as he sketched out a crude but detailed map, marking a twisting path through the dense jungle that lay beyond the town's borders. He tapped a finger on a crude blob of what Eliot could only imagine was a body of water surrounded by what had to be trees.
“Now right here on the edge of town…”
“Wait, I thought this was the edge of town?”
The old man looked up at Eliot, clearly running out of patience.
***
Eliot walked for what felt like hours, second-guessing every step, the map’s guidance proving to be more of a hindrance than a help.
He squinted again at the crudely drawn map, trying for at least the dozenth to make sense of the old man's scribblings. The lines twisted and turned, doubling back on themselves in a confusing tangle. Landmarks were marked with vague descriptors like "big tree" and "rock that looks like a dog."
The map’s latest landmark, assuming Eliot was even on the right path, was a ‘massive’ tree. For the last ten minutes the aspiring bounty hunter had stopped at every large tree he’d come across, scrutinizing them from every angle, trying to determine if one was ‘massive’.
Eliot was half sure at least a dozen times that he’d already passed the ‘massive’ tree when he came across a sprawling wooden monster with a trunk so wide it would take five men with outstretched arms to encircle it. The bark was rough and gnarled, pitted with knotholes and scarred by the claws of some large creature.
Is this ‘massive'?" Eliot muttered to himself, hand outstretched. He squinted at the map again. The sketch showed a large oval, but offered no sense of scale. He looked around, hoping for some other clue, but the jungle stretched out in all directions, an unbroken sea of green, all but admitting how lost he was.