Ten

“They made it to a remote area of northern Arizona, where they were stricken with a mysterious illness and died. When their bodies were located, carefully buried in the desert, the gold was missing. The legend went that the Spaniards had been cared for by a group of Indians living nearby and had made a present of the gold to the Indians. The Indians were, shall we say, questioned. But the treasure did not appear.”

As Mr. Mountmorris talked, I could almost see the wide, hot desert and the glimmer of gold coins. Zander and M.K. were leaning forward, listening intently to the story, and I could feel us all holding our breath as Mr. Mountmorris paused for a moment. I usually thought that Neos’ body lights were kind of weird, but there was something soothing about the way his blinked and flashed as he talked.

“Nearly three hundred years later, around the time of the invention of the Muller Machines, a prospector named Dan Foley was looking for gold in the region. Gold was highly valued, and with the war with Britain on, well… it was much in demand. Lost in an unexplored canyon, starving and exhausted, Foley made a wrong step and fell through a camouflaged wooden floor into an underground chamber. Later, he said that he thought he would die in the chamber, until, in the distance, he saw the glint of gold. When he explored further, he said he saw piles of gold bars—stamped with Spanish words—gold statues, and jewelry, and a ‘huge pile’ of Spanish gold ingots in another chamber along a tunnel. There was so much debris in front of the treasure that he had no way of getting to it without tools. Motivated by the idea of the fortune, he fought his way out of the mine shaft. When he returned to Flagstaff, he told a… well, a lady friend… about his discovery and bought tools to excavate the old mine. He left Flagstaff to return to the mine on June 15, 1857.”

For almost a whole minute, Mr. Mountmorris didn’t speak.

Finally, my curiosity got the better of me. “Well? What happened?”

He turned to look at me. “He never returned,” he said in a quiet voice. “It began to rain the next day. Very hard. The theory was that a flash flood tore into the remote canyon where he had seen the mine shaft and the gold. He wouldn’t have stood a chance. He is presumed drowned, though his body never washed up. The canyon near where he thought he’d found the Spanish conquistadores’ store of gold, and where he was lost, is now referred to as Drowned Man’s Canyon.”

“That must have been the title of the map,” I said. “So what happened? Did anyone ever find the gold?”

Zander and M.K. and I waited for the answer.

“No,” Mr. Mountmorris said finally. “Scores of men and women have gone looking for Dan Foley’s treasure, but no one has ever found it.” His eyes gleamed with a greedy delight. “But perhaps the great Explorer Alexander West knew where to find the treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon.”