“Everyone, apparently.” She addressed Dave. “I think it’s that thing that nearly made us go into the ditch on the way home. Remember? The black flying thing that swooped over us?”
“Of course I remember. But that sure as hell wasn’t an angel.”
Ross had a weird look on his face.
“Rossie?” she said.
“I think I saw it, too. On Christmas night.”
Her heart was pounding. “Really?”
“Yeah, when you guys were gone. I was sitting out there at night, just looking up at the stars, and something flew over me, bigger than a bird but smaller than an airplane. I didn’t know what it was, but it was black and silent, and it kind of spooked me, so I went inside.”
The three of them were silent for a moment.
“Can something like that actually be real?” Dave wondered.
“I’m pretty sure it is,” she said.
“What do you think it could be?”
None of them had an answer for that, and she thought about some of the things that had happened lately around Magdalena, some of the things she’d heard about, and she realized that the world was not as rational as she’d thought it was when she woke up this morning. And she knew that it never would be again.
TWENTY
Monday was free, no work lined up, so Jackass McDaniels did what he always did on such days—he worked his mine.
Well, it wasn’t really a mine. It was more of a big hole in the desert behind his house. But he’d been digging that hole for over a decade now, and it looked like a miniature version of an open-pit. Roughly circular, big enough in diameter to swallow his home twice over, and wider at the top than it was at the bottom, it went down a good sixty feet. A series of ladders and ledges allowed him to reach the pit floor. Although several layers of earth had been uncovered—striations on the sides made it look like a miniature Grand Canyon—he hadn’t yet found what he was looking for.
Gold.
He knew what the geologists said, what other prospectors had told him. This wasn’t gold country. This wasn’t even copper country, although Clifton-Morenci was only an hour or so away and the Copper Queen lode in Bisbee had yielded high grade ore for nearly a century before petering out.
But he had faith. He didn’t know why he was so sure when all signs pointed the other way, but he was and always had been, and it had kept him working on his mine for the past twelve years.
McDaniels had always been a rockhound. Collecting rocks and minerals had come natural to him, and as a youngster he’d been obsessed with lost mines of the old west, especially the Dutchman. He’d found more than his share of pyrite in the hills and mountains hereabout, and one day, as a teenager, he’d looked at his collection of pyrite and thought that if that fool’s gold was real gold, he’d be a millionaire. So for a lot of years, when he’d had a regular job working for the Terry Brothers doing roofing and construction, he’d spent his vacations gallivanting around the state, looking for lost mines and the caches of gold that were supposed to still be there. Gradually, he came to realize that many of the desert ranges that were said to be home to those mines looked a lot like the Magdalena mountains, and he started to wonder if the land around here might not have some veins of gold running through it. No one had ever tried to look for gold around Magdalena and he decided to be the first.
He’d been at it ever since, and though he’d never found so much as a single flake in a piece of rose quartz, he’d continued on, growing ever more certain as the prospects of finding the precious metal grew increasingly more unlikely.
This morning, with no jobs scheduled, he’d come out here after breakfast with his pickaxe and his goggles, and he’d fired up the gas-powered sandblaster he kept at the bottom of the pit and started his mining operation. He’d been at it for nearly three hours, had sifted through a lot of loose rock and sand, and was about to quit for lunch, when a dazzling light hit his left eye. He was looking in a different direction, but it was bright enough to make him tear up and force him to close his eye against the glare, and he shifted position and saw that it was some sort of mirrored surface at the bottom of the pit reflecting back a powerful ray of the sun.
Although he knew right away that it wasn’t just a “mirrored surface.”
Dropping his tools, he ran over to the shiny object and picked it up, hefting it in his hand.
It was a gold nugget, as big as a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.
McDaniels’ heart began beating crazily. Was it possible? Could it be real?
Yes. He knew it was authentic without even testing it. Dusting off the nugget on his shirt, he held it up to examine it more carefully, acutely conscious of its weight in his hand. Were there more like this? Had he happened upon a deposit that would yield him not just ounces of gold but pounds?