Go first to Davis Mountain. Davis Mountain is the key to the whole secret of the treasure. Once there, the hidden riches will be yours. But if you miss Davis Mountain, you might just as well have stayed at home. That you may not, by any possible accident, mistake Davis Mountain for any other peak, keep your eyes open for a rounded, bald, granite dome visible for miles across rolling plains that run from it to the east. From the summit, with a good pair of field glasses, you can see over a good-sized slice of New Mexico. The old sugar-loaf stands boldly up against the sky, and you should be able to identify it at the first glance.
When you arrive at Davis Mountain, head west. A mile or a mile and a half due west, you will find a canyon. The east wall of this canyon is formed by wooded hills. The west wall is sheer rock precipice. A creek flowing through the canyon plunges over a ledge in a small cataract about ten feet high.
Bubbling from the bottom of the west wall is Silver Spring in the shade of a tall juniper tree. At the foot of this tree is a grave marked by slabs of stone at head and foot. This is the grave of an outlaw. Five hundred dollars in gold is buried in a tin can at the head of it. But let that go for the present.
Up the canyon and south of Silver Spring at a distance of exactly one mile and three tenths is Gum Spring. Between these two springs somewhere—and you may have trouble here, as the canyon floor is overgrown with brush—lie scattered in the grass the remains of a burned wagon. Probably all the charred woodwork has rotted away by now, but the rusty old iron felloe-rims, axles, springs, and hubs, slightly imbedded, perhaps, in the soil, should be there yet.
From Silver Spring to Gum Spring, the west wall of the canyon curves inward to form a shallow cove. At the deepest point of this concave space and a little out from the wall—three feet or such a matter—stands a slender stone which, as it will doubtless strike you at once, resembles a small obelisk. As a detail, it may be added that this stone is three feet high, squarely shaped, and one foot thick. On the east face of this rock pillar, carved deeply as with a chisel, are two crosses one above the other and standing out clearly to the eye. When you locate this rock of the two crosses, you may regard the three million as all but in your pocket.
Now, at this rock, face Davis Mountain and step twenty paces east. You will find yourself at a point on a straight north-and-south line between Silver Spring and Gum Spring. And you will notice the wreckage of the burned wagon just in front of you. Stop right here. This is the spot. You will be standing directly above the buried riches.
All, you see, just as clear as daylight.
Buried here in the Davis Mountain Canyon, according to the story, is the pillage of many robberies in old Mexico and the Southwest. A cigar box full of diamonds that were stolen from the vaults of a bank in Monterey and that once glittered on the dusky beauties of that rich old city beyond the Rio Grande. Two statuary figures of pure gold, one of the Saviour and the other of the Virgin Mary, that once occupied sanctuary niches in the great cathedral at Matamoras. Sacks of gold and silver money. Thirty-nine bars of solid gold bullion and several rawhide aparejos containing ninety thousand Mexican dollars captured in an attack on a smuggler train in Skeleton Canyon. The value of three million dollars placed on the treasure was the estimate of the dying outlaw who is supposed to have taken part in the robberies and the burial of the loot. It took a four-horse team, according to this freebooter, to haul the treasure to its secret hiding place.
Anyone who ever happens to unearth the treasure need not be surprised to find a few feet below the surface a skull and white, mouldering human bones. This will be the skeleton of a Mexican whom the outlaws hired, on promise of a rich share, to freight the treasure in, and who was murdered and buried with it when his labour was completed. In this, the robbers followed the best tradition of the old buccaneering sea rovers who buried their gold on lonely tropical islands, the dead man’s lips being sealed upon the secret of the treasure and his ghost forever after keeping watch and ward above it.
Down in Sonora, a smuggler train was making ready to start for Tucson with what may have been the richest cargo ever to cross the international line. Great secrecy had been observed. Since Curly Bill’s massacre of the smugglers in Skeleton Canyon, the Mexicans had grown wary. But while preparations for the journey were being made, a swarthy fellow fluent in Spanish, boisterously friendly and with money to spend, was busily hobnobbing and drinking with the smugglers. This was Jim Hughes. A veteran of Curly Bill’s robber expeditions, Hughes was a sly, intriguing man, adept in treacheries, but as bold as he was cunning. A half-breed Mexican himself, his crossed blood made him particularly useful to Curly Bill in scouting out news of the smuggler trains coming north across the border. Acting now as a spy for the San Simon outlaws, Hughes was looked upon by these men of Sonora as a Mexican, an impression that he helped along by scathing denunciations of the whole breed of gringos. He was soon in the confidence of the smugglers and over the tequila in the cantinas had little difficulty in worming from them all their plans. The smugglers were to follow the old trail through Skeleton Canyon.
