Redemption

By Simon Toyne

Mid eighteenth century America. A man is given a bible by a dying priest and told it will lead him to a great treasure in the Arizona desert. But death awaits anyone who ventures into those savage lands - death and other things besides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Toyne
• Release date: Mar 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386389200

Simon Toyne

Simon Toyne is the author of the Sanctus trilogy (Sanctus, The Key and The Tower) and also the Solomon Creed series. His books have all been Sunday Times bestsellers and his work has been translated into 27 languages.

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The following is taken from the published memoir of

the Reverend Jack ‘King’ Cassidy,

(b. December 25, 1841, d. December 24, 1927)

Founder and first citizen of the city of Redemption, Arizona.

I

––––––––

It is, I suppose, a curse that befalls anyone who finds a great treasure that they must spend the remainder of their life recounting the details of how they came by it. I therefore hope, by setting it down here, that people might leave me alone, for I am tired of talking of it. I had a life of a different colour before riches painted it gold, and if I could return to that drab and unremarkable life I would. But you cannot undo what is done, and a bell once rung cannot be un-rung.

The story of how I found my fortune and used it to build a church and also the town I called Redemption is a brutal and tragic one, yet there is divinity in it also. For God steered my enterprise, as he does all things, and led me to my treasure. But he did not do this with a map or compass, He did it with tools of his own choosing: with a Bible and with a cross.

The Bible was the first thing he gave me. It was delivered into my possession by the hand of a dying priest, a Father Damon O’Brien, who had fled his native country under a cloud of persecution. I made his acquaintance in Bannack, Montana, where he had been drawn, as had I, by the promise of gold, only to discover that it had all but run out. The priest was already close to death when our paths crossed. I was down on luck and short of money and I took the bed next to his in a two-bit flophouse. I got my cot at discount because no other man would have it, too fearful were they of the old priest’s ravings and the violent terrors and tremblings that seized him about shadowy figures no one could see but him. The owner of the flophouse, too superstitious to turn the priest out on the street, slipped me some extra coin to take care of the old man, keep him in drink and, most importantly, keep him quiet. Being close to destitute, I took the money and the cheap bed and mopped the priest’s sweats and brought him bread and coffee and whiskey and listened to him mutter of the visions he had seen and the riches that would flow from the ground and the great church he would build and how the Bible would act as his compass to lead him there.

The foundation is here – he told me, clutching the large, battered book to his chest like it was a precious child.

Here is the seed that must be planted, for He is the true way and the light.

And he whispered how the book would lead the bearer to a great treasure God had planted in the western desert that was to finance the construction of a great church and town there.

Then one night, wide-eyed and staring, the old man woke me with his anguished cries and said he could hear the dark angels’ wings beating close by his bed. He pressed the Bible into my hands and made me swear upon it that I would take that book and continue his mission by carrying it south.

Carry His word into the wasteland, he said.

Carry His word and also carry Him. For He will protect you and lead you to riches beyond your imagining.

He pulled me close and told me he had money sewn into the lining of