“They certainly didn’t lack for much,” said the general. “They even had their own hot spring.” And he pointed toward a group of cottonwood trees on a nearby hillside.

“I can see why Gower was upset about being evicted,” said Nora.

“I’ll say.” Watts shook his head. “This is a little piece of heaven.”

They followed the general through a broken gate into the yard and up the portal to the front door. He removed a key and unlocked it, and they filed in, Lieutenant Woodbridge bringing up the rear.

The place was cool inside and smelled of dust and old fabric. The curtains had once been drawn, but the sun had left them hanging in tatters, its beams streaming through the gaps. It was a place somehow dignified in its simplicity. They walked through the foyer into a tiny living room with a rat-chewed sofa, two wooden chairs, and a broken table. The kitchen had an old woodstove in white enamel with chrome edging, along with another table and chair. The only decorations were a few magazine covers and newspaper pictures, framed and hung on the walls.

“It’s like a time capsule,” said Nora, looking around.

“Look at that,” said Watts, pointing to a high shelf in the living room. A moth-eaten cowboy hat lay upside down next to an old Parcheesi board. On a lower shelf were stacked half a dozen Life magazines and a National Geographic—one of the ancient ones with no picture on the cover.

“Where’s the test site, by the way?” Nora asked.

“The Trinity shot took place about eight miles north of here,” McGurk said. “As I mentioned earlier, Dr. Oppenheimer slept here the night before. Perhaps on that very cot in the back bedroom.”

“So where’s the historic plaque?” asked Watts, and everyone laughed gamely.

There was a long silence as they contemplated the old interior, dust motes floating through the bars of light. Corrie looked around, wondering if there were any clues here to Gower and what he had been doing on that fateful day. But the house told no story beyond one of hardscrabble existence and eventual abandonment. She finally mused out loud: “Look at this place. What was a guy like Gower, who obviously didn’t have two nickels to rub together, doing with a fabulously valuable cross?”

“He probably found the Victorio Peak treasure,” volunteered Watts.

The general and the others chuckled.

“Hold on,” said Corrie, startled. “What treasure?”

“It’s an old legend,” volunteered Lieutenant Woodbridge. “One of many, many old legends. Some claim a billion dollars in gold is buried on Victorio Peak. Others, twice as much. We passed it on the way here.”

Corrie looked around. “Why didn’t I hear of this before?”

Watts shook his head. “I was joking. It was a story made up in the 1930s by a man named Doc Noss, who claimed to have found a vast hoard of gold inside the peak. He spent the rest of his life raising money and blasting and digging, never recovering a red cent.”

The general nodded in agreement. “Noss was an old-school swindler. It was just one of his schemes for grifting money out of people, getting them to contribute to his so-called treasure hunts. Although I have to admit, that was one of his better ones. He was eventually murdered by someone he’d victimized—shot to death right on the hillside, in fact.”

“But how do you know there’s no gold?” Corrie asked.

Morwood now spoke. “Agent Swanson, New Mexico is full of legends of buried treasure. Virtually all of which are false.”

“So what is the legend?” Corrie felt a little aggrieved that no one had bothered to mention this so-called treasure to her.

“During the Pueblo Revolt,” Watts said, “the Spanish padres supposedly gathered up all the wealth from their churches and were transporting it to Mexico when they were waylaid by Apaches. They left the trail and hid the treasure in an old mine somewhere in this area, then blocked the entrance. In 1930 this con artist, Doc Noss, claimed to have found the treasure inside a shaft in Victorio Peak, but he accidentally caved it in while blasting a bigger passage.”

“‘Claimed’ being the operative word,” said the general. “Does anyone here know how much two billion in gold weighs?”

“Sixty tons,” said Woodbridge.

General McGurk chuckled. “The lieutenant has heard me rant on this topic before.” He threw her an amused glance. “No more answers from you.”

Woodbridge stiffened. “Sir.”

The general looked back at the others. “She’s right, though. Sixty tons. If you put that on mules, a hundred pounds to each mule, you’d need a train of over twelve hundred mules! Even if there were that many mules in all of New Mexico in 1680, there’s no evidence the Spanish ever mined anywhere near that amount of gold in the entire Southwest. On top of that, there’s no abandoned gold mine or shaft in Victorio Peak. Despite the geology being such that no gold could be found there, so many people have searched over the years that if the legend had a shred of truth, something would have been found!”

He looked around at the now-quiet group. “Sorry if I sound vehement. The legend fascinated me, too, when I first got here—it fascinates everyone. But I soon learned that the Victorio Peak ‘treasure’ has been a thorn in the side of WSMR from the beginning. Noss and his treasure hunters spent a decade blasting away on the peak with nothing to show for it. Ever since 1942, when the land was closed, we’ve had treasure hunters agitating to get in there and dig. Four or five times, the army tried to put the thing to rest by allowing treasure hunting companies to search the peak and its surroundings. They blasted and dug and probed with the latest instrumentation—and found nothing. They’ve literally ripped that poor hill apart. You should see what it looks like from the air.”