“Hey!”

Nora looked over quickly. It was Salazar, waving from the midden heap. “We never ate our lunches. Can we secure things and call it a day?”

She glanced over at Clive. He met her glance, shrugged.

“Bruce, Jason—you finished your quads?”

“Yup!”

“Uploaded all your survey and coordinate data?”

“Sure have.”

“Go ahead then, stow your gear and head back. Clive and I will close up the site. You can shut down the network, too—I won’t have any more data to add today.”

“Okay.”

“Tell Maggie to save some dinner for us. We won’t be long.”

As the two assistants took off their masks, hair nets, and gloves and began to stow their tools, Nora and Clive returned to the moldering leather pouches. Using a thin pair of forceps and a loupe, Nora pried gently at one. It immediately fell apart, revealing five pieces of gold.

With a gloved hand, Clive picked up one of the coins by the edges and turned it around. Even covered with dust and soil, it glinted in the sun.

“It’s a ten-dollar gold eagle,” he said. He peered closer. “Looks uncirculated, save for a high degree of bag marks. Struck in 1846—from the Philadelphia mint.”

“Wolfinger’s treasure?” Nora asked.

Taking the forceps from Nora, Clive teased open the remains of both bags. They each held five ten-dollar gold pieces, virtually identical.

“The year is right,” he said. “The mint is right. It’s just the number that’s wrong. There aren’t a thousand here—only ten.”

“After all this, you’re the last one I’d figure for a pessimist.”

Clive broke into a smile. “Pessimist? With those coins winking back at me? I don’t know about you, but that’s what I’d call proof. Now let’s find the rest.”

“If it’s here.”

“It will be,” said Clive. “Think about it. These two were already suspected of foul play. They were ostracized, not allowed to join the others in their shelter. So they made their own little camp here. And hid their gold somewhere close by. Don’t you agree?”

Nora felt a little uncomfortable speculating like this, but she couldn’t fault Clive’s logic. “I agree.”

She picked up the broom and the trowel and went to work on the site, moving quickly but expertly, wasting no time but missing nothing. Within an hour she had both skeletons exposed as far as their rib cages. Not only that, but she had uncovered some exceedingly rotten planks that appeared to be the remains of a small, crude shelter made from wagon pieces.

She sat back on her haunches while Clive used her camera to photograph the exposed portions of the skeletons and the pieces of wood.

“Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”

“You’re the archaeologist.”

“You’re the historian. But okay. Two individuals, both in their thirties, as best I can tell. Their skulls aren’t exposed yet, so I can’t be sure of the sex, but they appear to be male. No signs of violence so far. No cannibalism, either. Based on the fact that there are two of them placed here together, away from the main group, and judging by the gold on their persons—specifically, 1846 ten-dollar gold eagles hidden in their boots—I would say they are almost certainly Reinhardt and Spitzer.”

“All that’s missing is the gold. And, like I said, they would’ve hidden it around here somewhere.” Growing more animated, Clive added, “Nora: think what we’ve accomplished. We’ve been here less than a week, and look! Not only this—” he gestured at the money pouches— “but the Lost Camp. The Lost Camp. And we found it. Or rather, you found it.”

Nora considered herself an old hand at dirt archaeology, and she’d found several important sites over the years. But this sudden enthusiasm, this praise by an amateur—not an amateur, actually, but a historian who’d made this very discovery his life’s work—left her blushing with pleasure.

Without speaking further, they wrapped up the remains of the coin purses and their contents and placed them in an artifact container; secured the grids and exposed skeletons with tarps and fixed them carefully in place; returned to the HQ tent and placed the coins in the strongbox—and then headed down the trail, toward the campsite and dinner.

20

May 9

SHORTLY AFTER LUNCH the following day, Nora took a break from working in the dirt. She, Clive, Adelsky, and Salazar had focused on the Spitzer and Reinhardt site all morning. After explaining the discovery to the two assistants, Nora had finished exposing the skeletons, while the others had extended the excavations on either side, stretching out another meter into undisturbed ground. They had taken the entire area down to the 1847 soil horizon and even farther, in case the gold had been buried right at the site. But so far they had found nothing—no gold or any signs of a burial, only ragged scraps of clothing and a few buttons.

After lunch, Clive and the two assistants continued to work in that area. But Nora decided to take a break. Over the course of her career, she had discovered that, from time to time, she had to stop and let an archaeological site speak to her. Just speak. In the midst of digging, sometimes she got so focused on a square meter of dirt that she would start losing the overall story that the site was trying to tell her. That had happened while searching for the gold, and she had to remind herself that it was only a small part of the archaeological treasures the site was yielding.

So now she laid down her trowel and wandered about the site, shutting down the intellectual side of her brain, pushing out thoughts of gold, and “letting the history rise from the earth,” as one of her professors had put it. She tried to re-create in her mind the conditions of the site—the drifting snow, the bleak cliffs, the absolute wilderness—and how the people stranded in it were focused on one thing: survival. As she drew in the mountain air and looked around, she got a taste of the strangeness, the isolation, they must have felt. Today, they were a mere fifteen miles from a major interstate highway, yet it still felt like the ends of the earth. In 1847, the travelers would have been farther from civilization than anything conceivable today.

As she wandered around, her footsteps took her to an area down by the creek—the row of parallel grids labeled F that were farthest from the Hackberry trail. Here, in one isolated spot, the magnetometer had registered a small shadow, something unnatural, in or around grid F2. For some reason, this spot spoke to Nora. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was attracted to it because the place was more pleasant than most in the valley. She had not opened up this grid yet, but she felt it might contain something special, even important. It whispered to her professional instincts of history; of stories long hidden, waiting to be told. And there was something about untouched ground, before the first trowel had bit into the dirt, that seemed almost magical.

Most important, it would take her mind off the search for Wolfinger’s gold.

Carefully, she prepared to excavate F2. As she worked, she could hear the low chatter of Adelsky and Salazar floating down from higher ground, where they were finishing up the Spitzer and Reinhardt section—still with no success. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Clive. He’d wandered away from Adelsky and Salazar and was standing near the far line of trees, hands in his pockets, looking skyward, apparently lost in thought.