Autumn 1885
Kansas plains—outskirts of Henry Adams
Illuminated like a specter by the light of the full moon, Neil July sat his horse and voiced his doubts. “I don’t know why you’re burying the gold way out here. You’re never going to find it again.”
Griffin Blake tossed another shovelful of dirt from the hole he was digging. “Sure I will.”
“We’re on the plains of Kansas. No trees. No landmarks. Nothing to remember where it is when we come back for it.”
Griffin paused. “We? This is my gold. I robbed that train.”
“Well, yeah,” Neil admitted a bit sheepishly, “but suppose Shafts and I need to bail you out of jail.”
Griff glanced over at the big Comanche sitting silently on his mount. Two Shafts was Neil’s half brother. He rarely spoke and didn’t now, so Griff resumed digging. The three outlaws had been good friends for years, but the Julys, known as the Terrible Twins, were the physical embodiment of the mythical trickster Coyote. Griff trusted them about as far as he could toss them—and considering Shafts’s mountain-like size, that wasn’t very far. “Since I’m not going to jail, you won’t need bail. But if I come back and find this hole empty, I’m sending the Preacher to hunt you down.”
The Preacher was another mutual friend, but also a gun-toting, Bible-quoting bounty hunter, and the only one of his kind ever to apprehend the Julys and turn them over to the law. Granted, they escaped less than a day later, but the Preacher still wore the crown.
Griff dug down another three feet. Convinced that the hole was deep enough to guard his cache of purloined double eagles from predators both animal and human, he tossed the leather saddlebag inside. The bag also contained a newspaper account of the daring robbery, complete with an artist’s likeness of Griff, who thought himself far more handsome than the sketched rendering. But what was a wanted man to do?
With the hole now refilled, Griff used the sole of his boot to push a few rocks into the soil to mark the spot.
Neil shook his head. “You’re never going to find it.”
“Sure I will, and when I do, I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Nope. It’s going to be dug up a hundred years from now by some farmer putting in fence posts for a pigpen, and you’ll have been dead for so long, all you’ll be able to do is curse him from hell.”
Griff swung himself into the saddle. “Then I won’t buy you a drink. Let’s ride.”
And with a slap of the reins three of the most wanted outlaws on both sides of the Mississippi rode off into the night.