But Zwing Hunt failed to say where Davis Mountain was.
He told, it might seem, everything worth knowing about the treasure and how to find it except the one big thing that was the key to all the rest. His uncle, it seems, did not question him on this point. Why he didn’t seems almost as puzzling an enigma as Davis Mountain itself. Except for the passing mention that from Davis Mountain one could see into New Mexico, there was nothing in the outlaw’s alleged narrative that gave the slightest hint as to the location of this mystery peak. And, according to his uncle, when Zwing Hunt closed his eyes for the last long sleep, he left Davis Mountain the great sphinx riddle of the story of buried outlaw gold.
So you see the directions left by the dying outlaw are, after all, not quite so clear as you may at first have believed.
Virgil Boucher, an elder brother of Billy Grounds, whose real name was Billy Boucher, fell under the spell of the romantic tale Zwing Hunt is alleged to have told his uncle. Virgil Boucher came from Texas to Arizona for the first time to hunt the treasure in , bringing with him what purported to be Zwing Hunt’s original map and written directions. For more than thirty years, intermittently, he followed the trail of the treasure, making eighteen expeditions into the mountains of southeastern Arizona—the Chiricahuas, Stein’s Pass, Peloncillo, Guadalupe, and Silver Creek ranges. Failure after failure did not discourage him, and when he died three years ago in Duncan, New Mexico, he still believed, with the unshaken faith of a religious zealot, that the tale of the Davis Mountain treasure was true.
Mrs. Maggie Clinger of San Antonio is Billy Grounds’s sister, and she is troubled with no doubts whatever that the treasure is right where Zwing Hunt’s uncle said Zwing Hunt said it was.
“I’m just as sure about that treasure as that my name is Maggie Clinger,” said Mrs. Maggie Clinger. “I can see Silver Spring, the rock of the two crosses, and all the rest of it just as plain as if I had been in the canyon myself. I know I could walk straight to the spot where the treasure is buried, if,” said Mrs. Maggie Clinger, “I ever got to Davis Mountain.”
Bill Sanders, of West Turkey Creek Canyon, has been one of the most inveterate as well as most optimistic searchers for the treasure. He has lived in southeastern Arizona since early times, and knows the mountains as few men know them. He went on several expeditions with Virgil Boucher. He has acted as guide for a dozen parties of treasure-hunters. He has seen the original Zwing Hunt map and studied the written directions. He, too, has implicit faith in the truth of the story.
“There are Davis Mountains in west Texas,” said Bill Sanders. “But there is no Davis peak. I heard a few months ago that the wreck of a burned wagon had been found on top of a mountain in the Davis group. I went there and spent three weeks. The wreck of an old burned wagon was there, and I couldn’t figure out how it ever got on top of the mountain, but there was nothing in the Davis range that answered in any way Zwing Hunt’s description of the Davis Mountain country.
“But after twenty years of puzzling over Davis Mountain, I believe I have at last identified it. Harris Mountain, in my opinion, is Davis Mountain. I think Zwing Hunt got the two names twisted. Harris Mountain is the eastern gatepost of Turkey Creek Canyon, a few miles from the site of old Galeyville. It is a bald, rounded sugar-loaf. The plains of the San Simon Valley run off from it on the east. The state line of New Mexico is only twenty miles away, and you can see into New Mexico with the naked eye. And there is a tunnel-like cave in Harris Mountain in which the outlaws could have played poker. The grave ‘of a man named Davis’ is not there, but the grave of a man named Harris is. Also the grave of Harris’s wife and two children, all murdered by Apaches in . The Indians carried off Harris’s fifteen-year-old daughter, and she married a buck and had a papoose. She was rescued from the Indians in by a detachment of the Second Cavalry, and while she was being taken to Fort Bowie she pointed out the spot on the mountain where her family had been massacred. The soldiers found the skeletons and buried them. The peak has been known as Harris Mountain ever since.
“At the foot of Harris Mountain, to the west, is Turkey Creek Canyon, which is not in any feature like the Silver Spring Canyon described by Hunt. But ‘a mile or a mile and a half due west’ of Harris Mountain is a little canyon running up into Round Valley, and I have an idea this is the canyon of the treasure story. I am going to explore this Round Valley Canyon thoroughly, pretty soon, on a hunt for Silver Spring and Gum Spring and the rock of the two crosses.”
Harken now to the words of Rube Hadden of Paradise.
“I knew all the fellows in the fight in Skeleton Canyon,” said Rube. “There were only six. They were Jim Hughes, Milt Hicks, Jack McKenzie, Ike and Billy Clanton, and another fellow, whose name I’ve forgotten. Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds were not within fifty miles of the fight. I heard all about the
