Salazar rolled his eyes.

“But a lot less fun,” said Adelsky.

“I hear you, and I get it. You’ll both get a chance to help us secure the gold if we do find it. In fact, the main reason for today’s meeting is to see if we can’t brainstorm where the gold might have been hidden. I had some ideas I wanted to share with you.”

“Sure thing,” said Salazar. “I’ve been speculating about that myself. I figure that a thousand ten-dollar gold eagles, at half an ounce each, weigh about thirty-one pounds. Add to that the weight of the strongbox or chest, and I’ll bet the treasure is fifty pounds, at least.”

Nora was surprised he’d gone so deeply into the problem already. But then, she’d made the calculation herself. “Right. Good work. And two starving men couldn’t have carried a chest that heavy very far in deep snow.”

“They probably made an improvised sled out of a few planks and dragged it,” said Adelsky.

“That’s an interesting idea,” Nora said.

“And another thing,” Salazar interjected. “The gold couldn’t have been buried in the ground—it being frozen and all. They wouldn’t have left it in the snow, either, to be exposed by the spring melt.”

“Right on both points,” said Nora.

Clive laughed. “Looks like you two have thought through this as much as we have, and more.”

“I think we can rule out the chest being hidden in a tree, where it might fall or be seen,” said Nora. “So we’re left with one very obvious hiding area: the cliffs.”

“Unfortunately,” said Adelsky, “there must be a thousand holes and cracks up there that would fit a chest. And maybe they blocked it with rocks so the hole doesn’t even show.”

“I think we can safely narrow the number down,” said Clive.

“How?”

“By estimating how deep the snow was when the chest was hidden.”

“Right.” Adelsky leaned forward with excitement. “Right. Because if the snow was twenty feet deep, the chest would be, say, twenty to twenty-five feet up in the cliffs.”

“Exactly.”

A pause. “So…how can we know how deep the snow was when they hid the chest?” Adelsky asked.

Nora smiled. “Piece of cake.”

“Yeah?”

“Take it step by step,” she went on. “The party arrived at this valley in the afternoon, during a blizzard. It snowed two feet that night, the first storm of the season. Then it was one snowstorm after another. By February, the snow reached its maximum depth of approximately twenty-six feet. So if we know when the chest was hidden, we’ll know how high up the cliffs it must be.”

“And how can we possibly know that?” Adelsky said.

“As Clive would be the first to say: examine the historical record.” And she turned expectantly to the historian.

“Tamzene Donner kept track of snow depths and dates in her journal,” Clive said. “And the Lost Camp escapee, Boardman, told her a good deal about what happened here. Now help me reason this out: initially, the two killers must surely have hidden the gold somewhere in their wagon. They were not allowed to join the others in their shelter and were forced to camp some fifty yards away. Around November fifteenth, they broke their wagon up to make a shelter. We know the gold’s not in their shelter, so the chest had to have been hidden before their wagon was broken up, no doubt shortly before November fifteenth. Agree with me so far?”

Nods all around.

“According to Tamzene’s journal, in mid-November the snow was six feet deep. If it was six feet deep at Donner Pass, it would be six feet deep here, too. Given that, the chest should be in the cliffs at a height of six to twelve feet. QED.” He looked around with a smile. “Anyone disagree with the logic?”

No one did.

“But,” said Salazar, “that still leaves a ton of holes up there in those cliffs. You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“I can’t deny that,” said Nora. “Especially since we don’t know what the tree cover was like back then—that is, what areas would have given them camouflage from the camp. Because they had to be able to hide the gold unseen by the others.”

“What’s the plan, then?” Adelsky asked. “Look for a patch of hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old yellow snow as a marker?”

“No. We’ll divide the cliff faces into sectors and search each one in turn.” She rose. “You two get to work on those final quads, while Clive and I start searching.”

Salazar and Adelsky groaned in unison.

“I promise: with this amount of cliff face to cover, I’m pretty sure everyone will have a chance to search.”

While Salazar and Adelsky got out their tools and put on masks and gloves, Nora laid out a diagram of the cliff faces she’d drawn from camera images in her tent the previous night.

“I already divided the cliff into six sectors,” she told Clive. “Three on each side of the canyon, just as if it were an archaeological dig. We’ll start with sector one and proceed from there.”

“Looks like you’ve been busy.” Clive leaned over the diagram. “The far part of sector six is under that, you realize.” He pointed toward the far end of the meadow, where the rock walls came together. Some thousand feet above, a gigantic curl of rotten, melting snow along the lee side of a ridge—what they’d jokingly come to refer to as the “death cornice”—still hung menacingly over the narrow fissure.

“I realize that. Let’s hope we find the treasure before we have to search that area. Anyway, that’s nearly a quarter mile off—a long way for two starving men to lug a strongbox.” She folded the diagram and shoved it into a pocket. “As we proceed, we’ll mark off each searched zone on this master diagram.”

Clive nodded. “Good plan. Just keep an eye open—I’ll bet those rocks are prime rattler habitats.” He hesitated and lowered his voice. “When we find the treasure, let’s sneak it out and take it to Mexico and live happily forever after on the beach. What do you think?” He laughed merrily and gave her a fond nudge.

“We’d both die of boredom,” said Nora.

The two started scouting the base of the cliffs in sector one. A fair number of the holes were reachable by free climbing. But there were other sections with few hand- and footholds, and Nora could see that, eventually, climbing with the protection of ropes would be necessary.

“Ever done any technical climbing?” she asked.

“Nope. But I’ve always wanted to learn.”

“Well, if it comes to that, I’ll show you the basics of how to belay first, while I rope up—that’ll save time.”

Nora and Clive started free-climbing to every crack, hole, and fissure they could reach in the first sector, probing with hiking poles and headlamps. The first half dozen holes Nora shone her light into were empty, with at most a little brush at the entrance that she swept back with her pole. In one, a messy crow’s nest could be seen, with half a dozen babies sticking their necks up and peeping loudly, beaks open. The mother crow circled above, screeching furiously. Another fissure revealed a coiled rattlesnake, which buzzed angrily when Nora illuminated it, whipping into striking position. Nora jerked back so fast she almost fell. She scrambled down.