'They say they took out almost ten thousand ounces, cast it into ingots stamped with the Lion and Castle. The Apaches were tearing up the country, so instead of packing it out they walled it up in a cave waiting for things to settle down. It so happened that one day the Apaches raided the mine. They killed everyone except a
fellow named Juan Cabrillo, who'd gone to Abiquiu for supplies. Cabrillo came back and found his companions dead. He took off for Santa Fe and returned with an armed group to collect the gold. But a couple of weeks had passed and there'd been heavy rains and a flash flood. The landmarks had changed. They found the mine all right, the camp, and the skeletons of their murdered friends. But they never could find that cave. Juan spent years looking for it-until he disappeared in those mesas, never to be seen again. Or so the story goes.'
'Interesting.'
'There's more. Back in the 1930s, a fellow named Ernie Kilpatrick was looking for a maverick bull in one of those canyons back up there. He was camped near English Rocks, just south of the Echo Badlands. As the sun was setting he claimed he saw where a fresh landslide on a nearby rock face-just up TyrannosaurCanyon-had unseated what looked like a cave. He climbed up and crawled inside. It was a short, narrow tunnel with pick marks in the walls. He followed it until it opened up into a chamber. He just about died when his candle lit up a whole wall of crude gold bars stamped with the Lion and Castle. He pocketed one and rode back to Abiquiu. That night he got drunk in the saloon and like a damned fool started showing the gold bar around. Someone followed him out, shot and robbed him. Of course, the secret died with him and the gold bar was never seen again.'
He spit a piece of tobacco off his tongue, 'All these treasure stories are the same.'
'You don't believe it.'
'Not a damned word.' Peek leaned back and rewarded himself by lighting his pipe afresh and taking a few puffs, waiting for comment.
'I have to tell you, Ben, I talked to the man. He found something big.'
Peek shrugged.
'Is there anything else he might have found of value up there besides the El Capitan hoard?'
'Sure. There's all kinds of possibilities up there in terms of minerals and precious metals. If he was a prospector. Or maybe he was a pot-hunter, digging up Indian ruins. Did you get a look at his equipment?'
'It was all packed on the burro. I didn't see anything unusual.'
Peek grunted again. 'If he was a prospector, he might have found uranium or moly. Uranium is sometimes found in the upper member of the Chinle Formation, which crops out in TyrannosaurCanyon, HuckbayCanyon, and all around lower Joaquin. I looked for uranium back in the late fifties, didn't find squat. But then again I didn't have the right equipment, scintillation counters and such.'
'You mentioned TyrannosaurCanyon twice.'
'Big damn canyon with a million tributaries, cuts all the way across the Echo Bandlands and up into the high mesas. Used to be good for uranium and moly.'
'Is uranium worth anything these days?'
'Not unless you have a private buyer on the black market. The feds sure aren't buying-they've got too much as it is.'
'Could it be of use to terrorists?'
Peek shook his head. 'Doubt it. You'd need a billion-dollar enrichment program.'
'How about making a dirty bomb?'
'Yellow cake, even pure uranium, has almost no radioactivity. The idea that uranium is dangerously radioactive is a popular misconception.'
'You mentioned moly. What's that?'
'Molybdenum. Up there on the backside of TyrannosaurCanyon there's some outcroppings of Oligocene trachyandesite porphyry which has been associated with moly. I found some moly up there, but they'd already high-graded the deposit and what I found didn't amount to day-old piss in a chamber pot. There could be more- there's always more, somewhere.'
'Why do they call it TyrannosaurCanyon?'
'There's a big basaltic intrusion right at the mouth, weathered in such a way that the top of it looks like a T. Rex skull. The Apaches wouldn't go up it, claim it's haunted. It's where my mule spooked and threw me. Broke my hip. Three days before they medevacked me out. So yeah-if it isn't haunted, it should be. I never went back.'
'What about gold? I heard you found some back there.'
Ben chuckled. 'Sure I did. Gold is a curse to all who find it. Back in '86 I found a quartz boulder all spun through with wire gold in the bottom of Maze Wash. Sold it to a mineral dealer for nine thousand dollars-and then I spent ten times that amount looking for where it came from. The damn rock had to have come from somewhere but I never did find the mother lode. I figure it somehow rolled all the way out of the CanjilonMountains, where there's a bunch of played-out gold mines and old mining towns. Like I said, gold is a loser. I never touched the stuff after that.' He laughed, drew another cloud of smoke from his pipe.
'Anything else you can think of?'
'This 'treasure' of his might have been an Indian ruin. There are a lot of Anasazi ruins back up in there. Before I knew better I used to dig around some of those old sites, sold the arrowheads and pots I found. Nowadays a nice Chaco
black-on-white bowl might fetch five, ten thousand. That's worth troubling about. And then there's the LostCity of the Padres.'
'What's that?'
'Tom, my boy, I've told you that story.'
'No you haven't.'
Peek sucked on his pipe, with a gurgle. 'Back around the turn of the century, a French padre named Eusebio Bernard got lost up there somewhere on Mesa de los Viejos on his way from Santa Fe to Chama. While wandering around trying to find his way out, he spied a huge Anasazi cliff dwelling, big as Mesa Verde, hidden in an alcove in the rock below him. It had four towers, hundreds of room blocks, a real lost city. No one ever found it again.'
'A true story?'
Peek smiled. 'Probably not.'
'What about oil or gas? Could he have been looking for that?'
'Doubt it. It's true that the Chama wilderness lies right on the edge of the San JuanBasin, one of the richest natural gas fields in the Southwest. Trouble is, you need a whole team of roughnecks with seismic probes for that game. A lone prospector doesn't stand a chance.' Peek stirred the ashes of his pipe with a tool, tamped it down, relit it. 'If he was looking for ghosts, well, they say they're quite a few up there. The Apaches claim they've heard the T. Rex roar.'
'We're getting off the subject, Ben.'
'You said you wanted stories.'
Tom held up a hand. 'I draw the line at ghost dinosaurs.'
'I suppose it's possible this unknown prospector of yours found the El Capitan hoard. Ten thousand ounces of gold would be worth ...' Peek screwed up his face, 'almost four million dollars. But you have to consider the numismatic value of those old Spanish bars stamped with the Lion and Castle. Hell, you'd get at least twenty, thirty times the bullion value. Now we're talking money . . . Anyway, you come back and tell me more about this murder. And I'll tell you about the ghost of La Llorona, the Wailing Woman.'
“Deal”.
9
IN THE FIRST-CLASS cabin of Continental Bight 450 from LaGuardia to Albuquerque, Weed Maddox stretched out. Easing his leather chair back, he cracked his laptop and sipped a Pellegrino while waiting for it to boot up. Funny, he thought, how he was just like the other men around him, wearing expensive suits and tapping away at their laptops. It would be rich, really rich, if the executive vice president or managing partner next to him could see what it was he was working on.
Maddox began sorting through the batch of handwritten letters-illiterate letters laboriously written out on cheap lined paper in blunt pencil, many with grease stains and fingerprints. Clipped to each letter was a snapshot of the ugly bastard who had written it. What a bunch of losers.
He pulled the first letter out, smoothed it down on his tray table next to the computer, and began to read.
