Treasure on Superstition Mountain

  “Gold?” Aunt Kathy exclaimed. “Right here? On Superstition Mountain?” She glanced out the living room window at the hulking, craggy shape of the mountain. “It does look mysterious, doesn’t it? It’s so dark, even on this sunny day.”

  “The mine is supposed to have the richest vein of gold in the entire U.S.,” Simon told her. Turning back to Emmett, he said, “The woman we read about had the same name as the librarian. Not Schaffer, Thomas. We thought it was kind of an interesting coincidence.”

  “And her grave is at the cemetery,” Henry added. Which was more than a coincidence, and more than interesting … it was spooky.

  Aunt Kathy shuddered. “What were you boys doing at the cemetery? That doesn’t seem like a very fun place to play. Did you remember to hold your breath?”

  Jack looked at her appreciatively. “I tried,” he began, and Henry shot him a warning glance, sorry that he’d brought up the cemetery. Their parents didn’t know they’d gone to that place and certainly didn’t know what they’d found there. But Jack continued obliviously, “But then we were there for sooooo long—”

  Simon interrupted smoothly, “We thought you might know about her, Emmett, because of the historical society and all.”

  “Yes, I know a bit,” Emmett said. “Let’s see what I can tell you about Jacob Waltz and anybody named Julia.” He took a battered volume off the bookshelf and thumbed through it. Henry read the faded title: The Lost Dutchman’s Mine: History and Legend.

  “Here we go,” Emmett said after a few minutes.

  “Is she in there?” Henry asked. “Julia Thomas?”

  He nodded, reading to himself. “Her name was Julia Thomas, before she married Albert Schaffer. I think of her as Julia Schaffer, but you’re right, her original name was the same as the librarian’s. Is this the woman you’re thinking of—the one who took care of Jacob Waltz when he was ill?”

  “Yes,” Henry said. “She was with him when he died.”

  Delilah leaned forward eagerly. “Supposedly, he gave her a map … or at least directions to his gold mine.”

  Aunt Kathy sighed. “How romantic! Did she ever find it?”

  “No, that’s the local lore,” Emmett said quickly. “I don’t know how much of it is true. And I don’t think they were romantically involved.…” He stopped, his cheeks reddening slightly.

  Aunt Kathy seemed unperturbed. “Well, it’s hard to know what was going on between two people so long ago. And it’s still a romantic story! She cared for him till he died and then he gave her the map to his gold mine.” She laughed. “No guy has ever given me anything nearly that interesting.”

  “What’s ‘lore’?” Jack demanded.

  “Stories that people pass down, from generation to generation,” Henry told him.

  “Julia was quite the businesswoman,” Emmett said. “When she was unsuccessful locating the mine herself, she made a living—”

  “Selling copies of the map,” Simon interjected.

  “Yes, to the local gold hunters.” Emmett’s mouth twisted in disgust. “They were all stricken with gold fever, from what I can tell … like the other Julia Thomas and the rest of those folks in the historical society.”

  “What’s gold fever?” Jack asked. “Is it something you catch?”

  Emmett and Aunt Kathy exchanged glances and laughed.

  “No,” Emmett said. “At least not the way you catch a disease. It’s more like an obsession. All the person can think about is gold—how to get it, how to keep other people from getting it first.”

  “During the Gold Rush, it was common, wasn’t it?” Aunt Kathy asked him. “People were so driven.” And as Emmett nodded, she told the boys, “With gold fever, gold becomes the single point of focus for someone, more important than anything else in life. Like any addiction.”

  “It really was an addiction,” Emmett agreed. “People caught up in gold fever spent every last dime, lost their homes and families, all for the sake of their dream of striking it rich.”

  Simon considered this, rubbing his hand through his hair. “But if so many people were looking, and for so many years, why didn’t they ever find the gold?”

  Emmett sighed. “Is this really what you guys want to talk about? The gold? You should go to a meeting of the historical society.”

  “With that mean librarian?” Jack protested. “No way!”

  Emmett smiled. “Yeah, you’re right. She is kind of mean.” He ran his hand through his hair and Henry saw his expression soften, the way their mother’s did when she was about to change her mind.

  “So how come nobody ever found the gold?” Henry asked, echoing Simon.

  Emmett shrugged. “Lots of reasons. Maybe the gold never existed to begin with. Or Jacob Waltz mined it until the reserves were depleted. Or the mine is so well hidden it will never be found. Or the map that Julia Thomas circulated was a hoax.” His mouth curved in a half smile. “Or, if you accept the Apache explanation, the Thunder God took his revenge and made sure treasure seekers looking for the gold paid a price. Sometimes with their very lives.”

  “The Thunder God?” Simon asked. “What the heck is that?”

  Thunder God. Henry stared out Emmett’s window at the shadowy slopes of Superstition Mountain. Despite the heat of the day, he shivered. Was that why the mountain felt alive? Like it was always watching them?

  “Don’t worry, it’s not real,” Emmett said quickly. “Just part of the Apache belief system. The Thunder God is the god of the mountain. According to legend, he protects it from intruders. I imagine the name comes from the severe electrical storms and thunderstorms we have in this area, especially during the summer months. The storms are so loud and violent, the Indians saw them as evidence of divine power.”

  The Thunder God might not be real, Henry thought, but it seemed as good an explanation as any for the mysterious happenings on the mountain.

  Emmett returned to the book, reading silently. “Anyway, Julia Thomas sold maps or directions to the mine for years. And then remarried and became Julia Schaffer.”

  “You know what’s strange?” Simon said after a minute. He looked at Henry, his brow furrowed. “The tombstone in the cemetery…”

  Henry could picture it, old and cracked, with the name in faded letters. He knew what Simon was about to say.

  Simon continued in bewilderment, “It said Julia Thomas. Not Julia Schaffer.”

  Delilah got to her feet. “That’s right. Why would that be? Did she keep her maiden name or something?”

  “No,” Emmett said. “I’ve read about her as Julia Schaffer. You must be wrong about the tombstone.”

  “No, we’re not,” Simon said firmly. “We all saw it.”

  “Yeah, me too!” Jack piped up.

  Henry and Delilah stared at each other, nodding mutely.

  Emmett frowned, scanning the open book. “But she wasn’t even buried here in Superstition. Julia Schaffer moved to Phoenix with her husband.”

  “Maybe she came back,” Henry suggested. “At the end of her life?” It still didn’t explain why the name on the tombstone was Thomas.

  “No,” Emmett said. He turned The Lost Dutchman’s Mine toward Henry and tapped the middle of the page with his finger. “It says here that they joined some mystical religious group. They had fire pits burning on their property all the time. Julia Schaffer died and was buried there … in Phoenix.”

  Simon, Henry, Jack, and Delilah all looked at each other.

  “Then who’s in Julia Thomas’s grave at the cemetery?” Delilah asked.

  CHAPTER 16

  GOLD ORE AND LORE

  “HOLD ON,” EMMETT SAID. “You haven’t convinced me there IS a Julia Thomas grave at the cemetery … or even if there is, that it has anything to do with this Julia. I’ll have to go over there and have a look sometime.”

  “Sometime?” Jack protested, incredulous. “We should go NOW! We’ll prove it to you.”

  Henry was inclined to agree. He pictured the tilting headstone
. If the real Julia Thomas wasn’t buried in that grave, then who was?

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m sure Emmett has better things to do with his day than poke around an old cemetery,” Aunt Kathy interjected. “He’s been nice enough to let you come over and ask him all these questions.” She flashed another big smile at Emmett, who looked startled by her attention.

  “It’s not that,” he said evenly. “I have a meeting in Phoenix this afternoon, so there’s no way I can do it today. Maybe over the weekend.”

  Henry sighed. In his experience, the weekend was a black hole of adult promises that rarely came to fruition. “Well,” he began, “if we can’t figure out anything more about Julia Thomas right now, maybe you could tell us about the geology of the mountain?”

  Emmett’s face lit up. “Sure! What do you want to know? How it was formed? How it’s changing? The different kinds of rock?”

  “No, not that stuff,” Jack said. “We want to know where the GOLD is!”

  “Jack,” Simon rebuked, turning to Emmett. “We’re interested in anything you can tell us about the mountain.”

  Aunt Kathy added quickly, “Of course we are! I think it’s just fascinating that you know so much about it.”

  Henry stared at her. Why was she acting so strange and … sparkly? With an inward groan, he suddenly realized that she liked Emmett and wanted him to like her back.

  Simon continued, “And where you think the gold might be … from your work as a geologist.”

  Emmett let out an aggrieved sigh and studied the ceiling. “Come on, you guys, think about what we’ve just been discussing. People have been searching for the Lost Dutchman’s Mine ever since Waltz died—for over a century. They haven’t found anything.”

  “But you just said that could be because it’s so well hidden,” Delilah pointed out.

  “Or because it doesn’t exist!” Emmett countered. “That’s the most likely explanation.”

  Henry tried a different tack. “We thought you might know which areas of the mountain were the most likely…,” he began, but in the face of Emmett’s obvious frustration, his voice faltered. “The places with the best chance of having gold,” he ended weakly.

  “How does the gold get there, anyway? Can you tell us that?” Simon asked.

  That seemed something Emmett was more willing to discuss. He leaned forward in his chair. “Well, gold deposits can accumulate in lots of different geological environments,” he began. “Old volcanoes, hot springs, or sandstone or conglomerates—those are mixes of different kinds of rock—when they weather and erode. One of the most common places for gold to form is in ancient fault zones, where earthquakes once happened … two and a half billion years ago, during the Archean period.”

  “Two and a half billion?” Simon said. “That’s a really long time ago.”

  “Before the dinosaurs?” Jack asked.

  “Way before that,” Simon scoffed.

  “Right,” Emmett continued. “The earthquakes that happened along these giant faults—cracks in the earth’s surface—were accompanied by a release of hot liquids from deep in the earth’s crust. The solutions moved upward along the cracks, bubbling to the surface like the fizz in a bottle of soda when you open it. That process resulted in gold forming in veins of rock.”

  “But what IS the gold?” Henry asked. “Is it just another kind of rock? It sounds all liquidy when you describe it.”

  “Gold is an element,” Emmett said. He raked one hand through his hair, and Henry could tell he was trying to think of a simpler way to explain it. “Inside the earth—under the thin, hard crust on the surface—there’s a layer that’s molten, so it is liquid.”

  “Under the ground is liquid?” Jack exclaimed. “So we’re walking around on top of liquid?” He jumped to his feet and stomped hard on Emmett’s floor. “Cool!”

  “No—hot,” Emmett corrected him. “Very hot. That’s what molten means.”

  “Jack, careful,” Aunt Kathy said. “You don’t want to mark up Emmett’s floor.”

  Molten. Henry whispered the word to himself. He loved the kind of word that sounded like what it was—and this one sounded liquidy and hot and moving. Like lava.

  Emmett was lost in thought, talking about what went on deep below the earth’s crust. “The molten goo is full of elements,” he said, “and most elements like to form compounds with other elements. When they do that and cool down, near the surface of the earth, they become rocks or ores. But gold isn’t like that. It doesn’t like to form compounds; it’s attracted to other particles of gold more than to any other element. So it stays pure, which is one reason it’s so valuable. It forms nuggets or veins of pure gold metal. Does that make sense?”

  “Like soul mates,” Aunt Kathy said, and smiled.

  Henry stared at her. Why was she being so goofy? And why was Emmett blushing like that?

  Emmett’s cheeks flushed, and he cleared his throat. “Well, I’m not sure that’s the comparison I’d make—”

  Simon ignored this exchange. “So it’s like the way metal is attracted to a magnet, but gold is only attracted to itself,” he said thoughtfully. “But what does that tell you about where the gold might be on Superstition Mountain?”

  Emmett jumped up and walked over to the survey map on the wall. With one finger, he traced an area on the right side of the map.

  “Well, we know the location of some of the faults. We can compare those locations to the documented history of gold mining on the mountain, to the places where gold has actually been found. The Spanish discovered silver and gold ore in Arizona a few centuries ago, but the first evidence of mining on the mountain wasn’t until the 1800s.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jack said impatiently. “So where’s the gold?”

  Emmett continued to circle a peach-colored part of the map with his finger. “The most likely place is here. By Weaver’s Needle.”

  Jack raced across the room, and Henry and Simon quickly followed. Even Aunt Kathy stood up, tilting her head to one side as she studied the map. They all clustered around Emmett, peering past his fingertip at a pale orange area that was densely covered in elevation lines.

  “You think that’s where the gold is?” Simon asked.

  Emmett nodded. “Listen: as I said before, I’m not convinced there’s any left. But if there is, I think it would be somewhere over here.” He paused, tapping his finger. “Most likely in one of these little hidden canyons.”

  CHAPTER 17

  MAKING A DATE

  HENRY CAUGHT HIS BREATH. He thought of the secret canyon that he’d discovered while he and Delilah were waiting to be rescued, the one that was marked on the old map they’d found in the saddlebag. He remembered squeezing through the rock passageway into the narrow gorge, with its high walls and thin strip of blue sky overhead. Was the entrance to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine somewhere in that canyon? He looked at Simon, eyes wide, and Simon returned a quick, sharp glance.

  “The people who’ve been looking for the gold all these years,” Simon said slowly. “Do you think they’ve been searching that part of the mountain?”

  Emmett shrugged. “In a hundred and fifty years? The treasure hunters have looked all over the place. But the mountain has so many canyons and ravines, and some of them are so remote and difficult to access, it’s unlikely they’ve all been explored.”

  Aunt Kathy lifted her hair off her neck and twisted it into a ponytail, deftly sliding an elastic band over it. “What about the map you mentioned? That the Waltz fellow supposedly gave his girlfriend? Did it show the gold mine to be in that area?”

  Emmett shook his head impatiently. “First of all, she wasn’t his girlfriend. Second of all, we don’t know if he gave her a map or just verbal or written directions to the mine. Julia did have a map that she made copies of and sold to tourists and gold hunters, but I’m not sure any copies of it have survived. I’ve never seen one.”

  “Hmmm,” Aunt Kathy said, still squinting at the map. “What would an old gold mine look l
ike, anyway?”

  “That’s the problem,” Emmett said. “It might not look like much of anything—just a hole in the ground or the rock, generally not big enough for a man to stand in. And rock slides are such a common thing on the mountain—lots of those mine entrances get buried eventually. I’ve heard stories that back in the 1800s, when there was an avalanche, some of the miners were trapped inside them.”

  “Really?” Henry asked, horrified. “Buried alive?”

  “Yes,” Emmett nodded grimly. “You don’t get much warning of an avalanche, usually. You’ll start to hear the rumble of rocks falling, but they can come down so thick and fast there’s no time to escape.”

  “And people can’t dig their way out?” Delilah asked. “When the rock slide is over?”

  “It depends. If it’s just a few rocks, sure. But if it’s a massive rock slide, no. The rocks are too heavy to move.”

  It would be like a rocky tomb, Henry thought. Sort of like a mausoleum, but the people inside would still be alive. He shuddered.

  Delilah shook her head determinedly, as if shaking the image out of her mind. “But what about the mine entrances that weren’t buried by rock slides? Do they just look like holes?”

  Emmett nodded. “Sometimes the entrance would have been reinforced with wood beams, but often it was just dug out, like a tunnel. And the prospector would have good reason to keep it hidden.”

  “Camouflaged,” Henry said thoughtfully.

  “What’s that mean?” Jack asked.

  “You know, like army uniforms,” Henry told him. “Blending in.”

  Simon flattened his hand on the map over the peach-colored area of the map. “So you think even if the treasure hunters did explore these little canyons, they could have missed the entrance to the mine?”

  “Sure,” Emmett said. He glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, guys, but I need to get my stuff together and head into Phoenix.”

  “Oh, we stayed too long!” Aunt Kathy exclaimed. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention to the time.”