If you’ve driven along Main Street or stopped in any of the shops downtown, you’ve probably noticed a big black and brown mutt plodding along the sidewalk and digging through the dumpsters for a quick snack. That, my friends, is Ragamuffin, the mascot of Main Street. Nobody knows where he came from, but now he calls Main Street his home.

The merchants and vendors who run shops downtown have adopted this wandering troubadour as a shared pet of sorts. They leave things like meat, donuts, and veggies that have gone unsold. When it rains, they open their door to let Ragamuffin rest in a warm, dry corner. If they need to run an errand on a sunny day, they play a quick game of fetch on their way to their car.

Ragamuffin didn’t have a collar or a tag when he first appeared on Main Street. The townspeople searched far and wide for his owner, but nobody stepped up to claim him as their dog. I’ve never been one to resist a good mystery, so I made it my mission to figure out who he used to belong to and what happened to them.

The obvious answer is that he was the dog of a homeless person who died, but that didn’t feel right. Ragamuffin was far too clean and healthy when he first showed up. Something told me the truth was more complicated. After all, why would someone just abandon a dog as loveable as the Main Street mutt?

I spent hours upon hours of poring over footage from different security cameras located around Main Street. I spoke to everyone around who might have remembered the time when Ragamuffin first appeared. I went to every animal shelter within ten miles of Emerson Valley and talked with all the nearby veterinarians. After all that research and investigation, I finally discovered the true origins of our ownerless dog…he came from the forest.

Two years ago, Ragamuffin emerged from Blackwood Forest after his former owner took him there in search of buried treasure. That owner was Theodore “Teddy” Kent, a local man who lived in a dilapidated house on the west end of Jasper Boulevard. The only real notable thing about him was being the grandson of infamous bank robber and murderer Charles “Charlie” Kent.

For those of you who don’t know, Charlie Kent was a member of the Morley Gang that operated in this part of the state from 1929 to 1931. Their string of bank robberies ended when gang leader Thomas “Tommy Gun” Morley was gunned down and the rest of the gang arrested during a failed heist while trying to make off with $6,000 from the Bank of Carson Hills. Charlie had missed the heist because he had been assigned the task of hiding the gang’s stockpile of loot that verged on a quarter of a million dollars.

Charlie got a local farmgirl named Ellen Draper pregnant while hiding from the authorities, and his son John was born in 1933. Although Charlie was gone by the time Ellen discovered she was carrying his child, she decided to give their son his last name. Charlie died while being apprehended by the authorities in southern Texas in 1935. By that point, he was the last surviving member of the Morley Gang. The stolen loot was never recovered, and rumors swirled for years about where it could be hidden.

John grew up in Emerson Valley and inherited his maternal grandfather’s farm. He married a local woman named Annabeth Draper in 1961. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out if she was a cousin of some degree, or just someone who happened to have the same last name as his mother. The couple had Teddy in 1966. By the time Teddy was eight, John squandered the family’s money on race horses, forcing them to sell the farm.

People of a certain generation may remember Teddy grumbling about how the lost Morley Gang loot should’ve been his. He made many drunken pronouncements from his regular stool at Garrison’s Bar (this was before they added the Grill) about how he was going to find that money. Nobody took him seriously, considering he’d been repeating the same spiel for almost 30 years. Then, as if by the hand of fate, Charlie’s old journal was found in the walls of an old Texas farmhouse after it was purchased by a major conglomerate and knocked down to make way for a newer, better superstructure.

Teddy petitioned to have the journal turned over to him as a legal asset of his late paternal grandfather’s estate. The authorities granted his request after they had experts comb through it and determine it had no value since it didn’t say anything about the location of the stolen loot. According to Teddy, he’d pulled a fast one. He insisted the journal actually did contain directions to the money’s hiding place. It was written in a secret code that Charlie once explained to Ellen during their brief time together…and she taught it to Teddy before she died in 1983.

Nobody can recall Teddy actually revealing what the code was or how it worked. He was apparently convinced the Morley Gang’s loot was buried somewhere in Blackwood Forest. This information didn’t come from Teddy himself, but from what his fellow residents pieced together based on his actions in the days leading up to his disappearance in mid-2017.

An employee of Main Street Hardware remembered Teddy coming in to buy a shovel. He was seen purchasing a tent, a lantern, and extra batteries from Bill & Dave’s Camping Outlet. A few days before heading into Blackwood Forest, he stopped by the Ranger Station to pick up some trail maps, and he spent about an hour asking park ranger Jack Bridges different questions about certain landmarks in the forest. He was last seen toting his gear along the “E” trail with a black and brown mutt in tow.

The fate of Teddy Kent remains a mystery. Being a loner who discouraged visits to his home, he wasn’t even reported as missing for almost a month. It wasn’t unusual for him to stop drinking at Garrison’s during one of his many failed attempts to get sober. After a month had passed without seeing Teddy back in his stool at the bar, Garrison’s owner at the time, Pete Garrison III, went to the Emerson Valley Sheriff’s Department to report his disappearance. Sheriff Oliver Price conducted an investigation, but the trail had long since gone cold.

Most people who knew Teddy had no idea he owned a dog. The first time anyone saw the mutt was when he was following his owner into Blackwood Forest. I was able to find a veterinarian in Stonebrook who treated a dog owned by Teddy for ringworm in 2014, but she wasn’t certain that it was Ragamuffin. Whatever happened to his owner in the forest, the dog made it out seemingly unscathed and returned to civilization several months after Teddy disappeared.

It would seem that the only witness to Teddy’s unfortunate fate will remain mute on the subject. Whether or not Teddy found the Morley Gang’s stolen fortune is a secret only Ragamuffin knows. Without Charlie’s journal or the key to his secret code (if it even exists), it’s impossible to know where to begin looking for the money. Unless someone is lucky enough to stumble upon the metaphorical needle in a haystack, the location of the loot will remain just as much of a mystery as Teddy’s disappearance.

I would argue that despite no longer having an owner, Ragamuffin is still living a pretty good life. There’s probably a good argument to be made that it’s better now than it was when Teddy was around. The citizens of Emerson Valley will take care of Ragamuffin until the end of his days.

-William Cooper, Human Interest, Emerson Valley Gazette