The Lantren

By Dennis Mason

Two brothers of Native American descent, researching their mysterious roots turn into a treasure hunt. Starting with an old family register of past names and dates, then a letter and a gold coin from a great-grandfather that's been on the floor of the Atlantic in a strongbox on the Titanic for nearly a century.

With their grandfather and father, the foursome uncovers a device that was buried a few centuries ago by an ancestor in a water well. It changes the world forever. With unlimited wealth, they take on the United States government for a new unregulated life on the twins' terms. Circumstances lead them back to the well for a second treasure buried deep in piper hill.

So...journey with the twins and their family across the universe and back again, fighting an unbelievable foe and his army of eight thousand sons who want to use the twins' resources for evil and enslave mankind and rule everywhere.

Let the Lantren light your way!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662485589

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The Lantren

Dennis Mason

Copyright © 2022 Dennis Mason

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-6824-7 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8558-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

About the Author

To my brothers,

Gilbert Allen Mason and Richard Virgil Mason

Prologue

The Lantren is a timeless story and described herein during an epoch, a glimpse of its ageless history; instrumental in many times, many lands had passed to earth with Tyson Uzyr. Tyson Uzyr buried the Lantren on a hill in northwest Pennsylvania before the first billion men. He left it there and journeyed southwest to recover the abducted daughter of the Sachem of the Seneca Indian Nation. For according to the Sachem, The warrior who returned his daughter could forever lay claim to any portion of Seneca land.

Tyson Uzyr rescued the young woman from the slave market in Central America. During their return to her homeland, a son was born, Devide, a prince for the noble Indian race. Devide was six years old on the day the trio stood on a cliff overlooking a sacred Seneca ground. Tyson pronounced, I claim no man stand, and the earth convulsed beneath him, a lethal fragment of flint rock struck his head, and he fell buried under a half mountain of debris. His son was unconscious for several days and all memories were erased. The daughter of the Sachem lived only long enough to tell the claim of the Uzyr. Devide spent his life in a curious miasma of wonder. His powers of perception were awesome, but his effete faculty to reflect usurped his cognition, and he grew into a forcible monster, turned to the clutches of alcohol, found pity in euphoria; ever sensing but never knowing the treasure beneath his land.

Some men still die and so passes the Lantren…

Chapter 1

What they wanted was not in the bible. The cumbersome, dust-stained text spent thirty years in oblivion on a stack of Life magazines in Pearl Uzyr's attic until her grandnephews succeeded in rescuing it from her in hopes that it would offer insight into the investigation of their roots. The Uzyr family history was obscure; the links to the past were few and spending solitary lives in scattered pockets of northwestern Pennsylvania. Some of their names, birthdates, deaths, etc. were recorded in the frontispiece of the book, but the ledger had not been dutifully maintained. The grandnephews sat with their father in his spacious family room to review the old bible that provoked more questions than it answered.

Virgil Uzyr leaned over the knee-high coffee table, engrossed in a design of solar heating system for his swimming pool while monitoring the conversation between his sons, Rex and Pax. He drew back from the notepad. He scratched the bridge of his nose with the pencil eraser and smiled at his sons. Yesterday, they had celebrated their thirtieth birthdays; they looked twenty, fraternal twins, tall, and slender with gaunt faces and deep beryl-green eyes that ever masked their countenance. Any onlooker spent but a mere glimpse at their darkened skin; it was their hair that induced people to stare. It was white, niveous as sunstruck snow, thick and long.

Rex, firstborn of the twins, had a natural wavy hair that flowed away from his forehead and settled just below his shirt collar. Pax's hair was uncommonly straight yet also arched away from his face and was approximately the same length as his deeply tanned brother. They had long grown accustomed to people staring at them wherever they went; when they turned toward an onlooker, the dark-green eyes were immediately avoided. They sensed their father's gaze and turned to look at him. Rex held a half-turned page of the faded bible between two unusually long fingers as Pax blew quick smoke rings that became immediate myriads in the wind-filled room.

Virgil smiled. I'd say you two'll have to come across your great-great-grandfather's obituary, a library most likely, Warren, maybe Bradford would be the better bet. Your Grandpa Seymore (See'more) has little to say about his grandfather. About all he ever said was that the Old Uzyr died diggin' a well. I think he said it was around Bradford, but I'm not sure.

Here we go! exclaimed Rex. He stood and placed the heavy text beside Virgil's clipboard and pointed to a faded inscription of the marriage date for David Uzyr and Olive Home. Married 1850 at Derrick City, he added.

Derrick City? Is that Pennsylvania? asked Pax.

Yes, it's not much of a city, more like one of those don't-blink-your-eyes-on-the-way-through villages. Not far from Bradford.

Derrick sounds like oil, Pax. Maybe the Old Uzyr was an oilman.

Excitement was in the room with the Uzyrs and passed among them with laughter and illusion. For time out of mind, all inquiries concerning ancestry had been artfully dodged and conveniently dismissed, but the twins were determined to trace the history of the Uzyr family beyond the nineteenth century. They planned a trip to Derrick City for the next morning.

Virgil emptied his coffee cup. Treat yourselves to a visit with your grandfather on your way tomorrow. I've never known him to avoid a question from you two. He'll more than likely cast a bit of light on your path.

*****

Pax and Rex stood on the first of three wooden steps outside the pine-green shingled house of their grandfather. Rex rapped sharply on the porch door and zipped his windbreaker as the dampness of the rainy autumn morning crept inside his shirt. The runoff dripped intermittently on the heads and shoulders of the waiting twins, and the air was heavy with the smell of drenched wood. Rex knocked again just as Seymore Uzyr opened the inner door. Seymore was a stocky, strong man with tufts of silver beneath a faded gray dress hat that rested on the back of his tanned balding head. He wore a remarkably white T-shirt and loose khaki trouser, supported by cracked brown leather suspenders. The deeply etched round face was accented by an anticipatory grin that held a long black cigar in the center of his smoke-stained teeth. Seymore withdrew the cigar as he opened the porch door.

Come in outa that drizzler, boys. That's some bone rattlin' weather out there.

The heel of his stretched slippers clopped across the wooden floor as he led them along a brief hallway to the living room and became a muffled thumping when he walked across the brown and white throw rugs that covered the walking surfaces of the dim room. Seymore sat with a sigh in a dark cushioned rocking chair that creaked comfort, kicked his slippers off, and crossed his bare feet on a leather footstool. The twins sat to his right on a deep-seated divan that matched the soil color of the stool. Seymore snapped a match to flame and drew it into the cigar. Smoke enveloped the senior Uzyr and moved like wind-kissed curtains in the still air. He professed admiration for good conversation tantamount to learned loneliness. Seymore had lived alone for nearly twenty years; for sixty years, he lived at Kinzua. Cynosure of the ancient Seneca Indian Nation along the Allegheny River, until the land was obtained by the United States government for a dam project; Seymore was compensated for his land with property in Pleasant Township, west of Warren, Pennsylvania; there was no recompense for the death of his wife, Warm Snow. A shadow fell into her when she learned that they had to give up their property, and she gradually decayed from within and died at sunrise four days before their relocation. Seymore was not bitter toward the government, he was simply emptied of all allegiances. His mother was full Indian, and his father was also of native descent; indelible Indian traits flowered on Seymore's face and fortified his soul. He was at the edge of eighty and still took long treks in the Allegheny woods. When Rex was in grade school, he went to the woods regularly with his grandfather and listened to the endless stream of information about the awesome forest and its creatures.

Rex began, Seymore, Pax and I are on our way to Bradford to dig up some information on David Uzyr—a bemused smile briefly lit the old man's face and vanished as Rex continued—and try to trace the family history beyond him. Aunt Pearl let us borrow the family bible, but it begins with the marriage of David to Olive Home in Derrick City in 1850. Can you tell us much about David Uzyr and Derrick City?

I can tell ya that he owned it.

Owned it? repeated Rex.

Derrick City, the whole town or for that matter all the land 'round there' fore it came to be a town, till they swindled it from him. Why, ya couldn't ride from one border of his land to the other on a young horse in a day. He paused and issued a stream of thick smoke rings that billowed around his feet.

Who swindled the Old Uzyr, Seymore? asked Rex.

Some oil outfit ran a test on the land and fooled him into believin' there wasn't any oil on it, they got the land dirt cheap, and less than a year later, oil derricks sprung up like porcupine quills in a pup's nose. An entire city of people moved in, yep, granddad's land became home for ten thousand money spendin' people.

Rex asked, Couldn't he have taken them to court?

Most likely, Rex, 'cept he turned to drinkin' instead. Some men struggle too deep with a problem. It gets so far down in their gut, it burns, burns 'em for the rest of their breathin' days and they pour liquor down their gullets to put it out, but it's spiritual fire. Ain't no puttin' out one of them buggers.

Dad said he died diggin' a well, said Pax. Was it an oil well?

No, boy, it was a water well. The Old Uzyr was a fool, that's that, but he wasn't out to lunch altogether. He knew enough to keep fifteen hundred acres north of Derrick. That's where he died. He commenced diggin' a water well on his birthday, May 2, diggin' and drinkin' to the point where he filled it up again and collapsed right on the spot. Even left his pick at the bottom of the hole, must have no one ever found it. Your great-granddad, William, was a mere sprout then. He found the Old Uzyr. They say he came to, drunker 'n' a brewery fly, mumblin' about the well and his pick, said his hands were green 'cause of the Lantren, and he went crazy about the devil in the ground, loosin' his land and screamin' for another drink. He died a tremblin' death with sweat pourin' outa him like rainwater through a feed sack. William never spoke of it to me. I and everyone else knew better 'n' ta poke around to him about it. I learned what I just told ya from listenin' in a jaw session of Uzyr women.

Do you know who owns the property now? It seems you should have inherited the property.

Seymore leaned back and exhaled an expanding stream of smoke. "That's the way it should have gone, 'cept my Pap's widow was my stepmother. She survived the Titanic and remarried. She and I never got along from the moment Pap brought her home from a trip to Pittsburgh. She was a no-good fortune hunter that'd steal gold teeth from dead soldiers and curse their smell. I don't know what became of her, the land or William's lumber business. Don't know and don't care to know."

Silence prevailed in the small room as the twins sifted the information.

That's ol' Rags at the back door. She's been out sniffin' the rain all morning, must have stopped drizzlin'. That black dog, white dog always has had a grin for a good rain. Seymore rocked forward and went through the hall toward the back door.

Rex watched an usher wind lift a splayed branch of the tall pine past the window. This venture is dyed in riddles, Pax. Green hands, Pax. What about the green hands?

A hundred years of grass has grown over that well, Rex, and the tale comes to us covered with a proportionate amount of Uzyr family repression. There's simply not enough information.

Rags came trotting around the couch, briefly smelled the bottom of Rex's boots, and skated her nose along the rug to Pax. Pax leaned over and worked his hands into the fur around her ears.

Black dog, white dog, he said.

Rags was a mix between Border Collie and German Shorthair Pointer with definitive black and white markings; best described by her whiskers, the left side of her muzzle was black and white whiskers, and the right side of her face was white with black whiskers. The remainder of her markings were clearly defined but irregular.

Seymore entered the room and sat on the footstool. A thin stream of sunlight separated him from the twins. Rags walked through the radiant curtain, and the light sparkled in her hair like evening sun on wet grass and hints of reddish-brown fur were revealed in the black patches. She stopped at Seymore's legs and laid down with her muzzle on her extended forepaws. Seymore blew a stream of smoke into the shaft of the morning sun. The smoke was illuminated and spread swift patterns of concise, billowing currents up the shaft and toward the floor simultaneously. Even Rags was watching the streaming shades of gray that worked in an undulating kaleidoscope that seemed self-replenishing as the swirling patterns moved up and down the slanted beam. Seymore popped a large, thick smoke ring directly into the warm, thin light curtain. It was a rolling ring of smoke that began to thicken, a couple at the edge nearest Seymore. The sun caught it; it glowed and seemed pulled toward the floor as a thin column of edged smoke grew out of the couplet. In an instant, the wisp grew nearly a foot tall, curled to find the rug, pulling a steady flow of smoke from the wavering ring, which thickened the column until it opened into a second ring on the floor. When there was a balance of smoke in each ring, the link rose and dissipated. The heat in the cynosure of the beam caused the rings to expand and undulate and a wizard smile broke on Seymore's face.

Do you know about the family prior to David?

No, son, replied Seymore. The folks I knew had next to nothin' to say about the Old Uzyr. They couldn't forgive him for loosin' the land and drinkin' like he did. I am the eldest Uzyr, and I truly wish I could help you find some answer, but I know little more about my ancestors than I've told you. Much of what could have been passed along died with the Old Uzyr. I know that he was as Indian as could be except that he had purely white hair such as yours and the Uzyr toe.

Seymore wiggled the toes of his right foot, the second and third toes from the big toe were joined; a single toe with distinct toenails. The genetic oddity had occurred in the firstborn Uzyr male as far back as David Uzyr. Each of the twins received the queer link and heralded it since childhood as a symbol of uniqueness and permanent kinsmanship.

So the Uzyr twins had spoken with the most knowledgeable living link to their past and prepared to leave to seek documented assistance.

Rex stood, stretched, and said, We're off to Bradford and Derrick City, Seymore, to check newspapers for obituaries and articles.

He looked at Rex.

We would enjoy your company, sir, if you would like to join us.

Seymore's brown arms encircled his grandsons. It'd be a good ride, boys, but Rags and I are going to the woods for a few days. I'll pass this time, but keep your granddad posted on your findings and maybe we'll do some diggin' together. Another curious smile blinked on the elder's face.

They walked to