Kettle told him that the object had been in the Kettle family for 159 years. It had been given to Kettle's four-times-great-grandmother by one of the ones who were already there in the year the family first came into the valley as a token of what Kettle called the arrangement. Wickham asked what the arrangement was. Kettle told him the arrangement, as Kettle described it, had been made between the first settlers who came into the valley and the beings who lived in the older diggings.
And it had been very simple. The settlers would not go into the older diggings. They would not attempt to open the sealed slabs. They would not, above all, disturb the sleeping.
In return, the beings in the older diggings would not come up to the surface, and they would not take children from the settlements, and they would leave the valley to be worked and farmed and lived in by the human families who had come there. The arrangement had been honored by both sides for nearly 140 years. Kettle said that his grandmother, who had died in 1841, had told him that the arrangement was still in force, and that as long as no settler was foolish enough to break it, it would remain in force. Kettle, who had lived his whole life in that country, had never heard of a child being taken, he had never heard of a slab being opened.
He had, until the day Wickham described the boy to him, believed that the arrangement was intact. But the boy, Kettle said, was proof that something had changed, and whatever had changed, it had not been changed by the ones below. Kettle was certain of that. The ones below did not break their own agreements.
If a child had been taken and raised in the lower rooms and then released, it was because someone on the surface had broken the arrangement first, and the ones below had responded by beginning to break it in return. Kettle told Wickham that if he wanted to know what had been broken and by whom, he needed to look not at the ridge above the flat stone, but at the men in the county who had been digging where they should not have been digging. He named three of them. Wickham wrote the names down, and then Kettle put the piece of metal back in the oil cloth, put the oil cloth back in the chest, locked the chest, and told Wickham that he would not see him again in this life.
Kettle died 6 days later in his sleep, apparently of natural causes. He was found by a neighbor who had come to bring him a jar of preserves. The cabin was undisturbed. The rifle was still on its pegs above the mantle.
The chest in the corner was still locked, and the key was still on the leather thong around Kettle's neck. But when the neighbor, following the instructions of the county coroner, opened the chest to inventory, the contents for probate, the chest was empty. The oil cloth was gone, the piece of metal was gone, and there was no sign of forced entry into the cabin, no sign of a struggle, and no explanation for how any object could have been removed from a locked chest whose only key had been around a dead man's neck. Wickham, who had ridden out to the cabin as soon as word reached him of Kettle's death, examined the empty chest himself, and according to his sister, said nothing for a long time.
He then walked outside, stood in the yard for approximately 10 minutes, looking at the ridge line to the west, and rode back to Pickens. He did not enter Kettle's death in his ledger. He did not mention the missing object in any surviving correspondence except the one letter to his sister. But from that day forward, according to Cassie Peele, who was interviewed in 1931 by a WPA folklore collector named Ruth Anna Fetman as part of a project on West Virginia oral traditions, Wickham slept with a lantern burning in the parlor and kept his revolver on the bedside table with the hammer cocked.
The three names Kettle had given him were entered in the ledger, and Wickham over the following two weeks quietly investigated all three men. The first was a coal operator named Franklin Borland who had opened a small mine on a lease about four miles north of Pickens in the autumn of 1901. The second was a farmer named Elma Reynolds who had, according to local gossip, been digging for years in a hollow on his property in search of a Confederate gold cache that supposedly had been hidden there in 1863. The third was a man named Doctor Prosper Aling Clauss, who was not a physician but a self-styled naturalist and antiquarian originally from Boston who had settled in the county in 1897 and who was known to have paid local men to help him excavate certain hillside features that he believed were the burial mounds of an ancient race that had preceded the Cherokee.
Wickham interviewed all three. His notes on the interviews, according to the sister's letters, were extensive and troubling. Borland, the coal operator, admitted that his mine had struck what he called a strange void at approximately the 200-foot mark. His crew had broken through a wall of unusually hard rock into a hollow space that was, in Borland's words, larger than a church, and smoother than any natural cave he had ever seen.
Borland had ordered the crew to seal the opening with masonry and to reroute the tunnel around the void. He had done this, he told Wickham, because two of his men who had gone into the void had come out changed. One had died within a week of what the doctor called brain fever. The other had gone home to his family in Kentucky and had, according to a letter Borland had received the previous month, hanged himself in his own barn.
Borland was not a superstitious man, but he had sealed the void, and he intended for it to remain sealed, and he would show Wickham the map of where the void was, but he would not, under any consideration, take him there. Reynolds, the farmer, had been digging in a hollow at the back of his property for 11 years. He had found no gold. He had, however, found in the winter of 1901 a passage.