They found a level spot back in the hills, raised a tent, and rested as the sun went down. That night Juan and Willy studied the map by the light of a lamp that they had borrowed from Willy’s brother. It seemed they had found Depredation Gulch because the map had noted the old abandoned smelter, which they had found. They had driven fourteen miles further into Depredation Gulch, so the Babbling Padre’s potato rocks and surface silver placers with gold nuggets mixed in should be close by their casual reckoning.
The next day they ate breakfast and walked up into the canyon with the scopes, magnets and wands that Mr. Franklin had sold them. They tried to pin down the location of this fabulous gold.
Now, they were in the deepest canyon of the Massacre Mountains, as the old babbling padre’s instructions required. They discovered plenty of rocks but the question was which one was the potato rock? Funny thing was a lot of rocks in the mountains of Southern Arizona look like potatoes when you get right down to it. Some were long skinny potatoes and some were stout and fat potatoes. Some had broken open, as though they were steamed or baked and pressed apart on a plate for you to eat, and some were smooth and solid like a thin-skinned boiling potato. Some even seemed to have eyes, like potatoes you kept too long. But which was the padre’s special potato rock? Which ones had placers behind them with gold in among silver?
Willy was thinking, “If only there was something more telling that the babbling padre had described like a rock that looked like a Snoopy head or one painted, chipped, and engraved with a sign saying ‘Here I am, the special potato rock, and by the way, the gold you want is over there.’”
There were potatoes here and potatoes there. There were potatoes everywhere Juan and Willy looked. There must have been hundreds of rocks that could have been the potato rock. They tried their magnets and then their wands and finally their scopes on all the soil behind rocks but they hit upon nothing.
They searched around like that for a whole day and the next. The following day, the third, was promising to be about the same. Sitting under one of the tall oaks, they discussed which direction they should try to walk toward. But what they didn’t say to each other was that they thought they were not going to find the gold. They both thought they had had it with searching.
They had looked for three days almost non-stop in those hills and all they found was a small graveyard, with about thirteen wooden grave makers in it and a fence that was broken and falling down.
“You know something, Wilhelmo,” said Juan when they left the graveyard and started back to their truck and camp.
“What Juanie, my friend.”
“These hills in a month, when it is really spring out here, these hills will be covered with snakes, I think. We will have to come back in the fall, if we come back.”
“Mierda. I hate snakes. There is nothing more in the world that I hate more than a bunch of chingadera snakes,” Willy confessed.
“I can see the holes of the mouses.” Juan kicked at a hole and Willy noticed what he meant.
“Dang,” he said.
“So if we’re going to find gold we better hop to it, comprende?”
“I just don’t know if I trust those notes from the babbling padre.”
“Spoken like an Anglo,” said Juan.
Just about when they were all turned around, and had thought about going back, fate gave them a turn. As usual for them, it was a turn in the wrong direction.