Page 29 of Riches Beyond Measure (Golden State Treasure #3)
“What day is it?” Annie asked. “We had no idea how long we’d been unconscious when we woke up in that cellar.”
“It’s Wednesday. We expected you last Saturday. You’d been gone a week.” Ellie began scooping stew onto plates and passing them around.
Brody saw his brothers eyeing the hot food with so much hunger it made his heart ache.
Annie took a plate of food and knelt beside Cord, whose head Brody had bandaged. Between bites she said, “I have to get back right away. Caroline’s been without me for too long...”
“What about Hardy?” Thayne broke in. “We found a lot of artifacts. It sounds like they were all missing from Grandpa’s claim.”
Josh sat on a log with his plate of stew. “Well, he’s not gonna just ride off with all he stole and not face up to it.”
“We’ll find him and Rombauer, don’t you worry,” Brody said.
“Yep, and we’ll start by riding into Cornerstone tomorrow since that’s the closest town with a telegraph office. We’ll send out wires to the surrounding towns with train stations and ask their sheriffs to help find those two outlaws.”
Cord stirred at last, his eyes fluttering open. “I-I think there’s more treasure there,” he said, his voice groggy but understandable. “I don’t believe we found everything that site has hidden.”
“Maybe Hardy found gold,” Lock said.
Cord tried to sit up.
“No, no, lie back down,” Brody urged. “You need to rest. You’re a battered man.”
“I hurt, Brody, but I’m going to be all right.”
“You think he found gold, Lock?” Cord asked.
“I never saw it if he did, and you’d better believe I was watching. And with Rombauer being gone as much as he was from the dig site, I can’t imagine he found any gold either.”
“No doubt he was out searching for a place to lock us away,” Cord muttered.
Nodding, Lock said, “He was no help to us, that’s for sure. And Hardy didn’t do hardly a lick of digging. He was too busy writing about what we found. That makes me think he didn’t find gold.”
“It’s about time we send the law after those coyotes,” Cord added. “But I wonder if they didn’t run off before we found what was really good.”
Brody wondered what Cord considered really good .
Lock pulled a small leather pouch out of the waistband of his trousers. “I didn’t talk about it after that first time, Annie, but I found twenty more gold doubloons while I was digging.”
Brody gasped. “Twenty more?”
“Yep, and it’s enough to keep us all comfortable for a long time, maybe the rest of our lives. You said fourteen doubloons would go a long way. That’s the number of gold coins Grandpa MacKenzie had on him when they found his body. Well, thirty-four coins oughta help all the more.”
Michelle had told them the coins could be worth as much as a thousand dollars apiece.
“Annie insisted we needed to return home,” Lock went on.
“Hardy may have found something we didn’t recognize as valuable.
And he knew we weren’t going to let him run off with it.
Or maybe he did find a stash of gold coins like these ones.
Whatever the case, he tried to take away with him what we’d dug up.
But we refused, told him it all had to go back to the ranch first to be recorded, and then we’d maybe loan him the artifacts he wanted so he could study them at his university.
He seemed to accept that, but obviously he decided to take matters into his own hands. ”
“Or maybe,” Thayne said, “he decided he’d found all he was going to find at that site. We dug up enough to fill six travois, but it had tapered off. It’d gotten to where we weren’t finding much around that well anymore.”
“I wonder if he might run all the way to Spain,” Annie said. “Those artifacts might be extremely valuable to the Spanish people. Remember how he made such a fuss over that badge that might have a picture of Cortés on it?”
They all sat quietly for a bit, wondering what to do next.
Tilda broke the silence. “We’re assuming it was Hardy and Rombauer responsible for what happened, but we don’t know that for certain.”
“Who else could it be?” Annie asked.
Her question brought on another stretch of silence.
Annie finally said, “Send out the wires to try and find them. They almost have to run for the train, don’t they? Then I have to go home to Caroline. She already lost her pa. I don’t want her scared that something might have happened to her ma.”
No one could argue with that.
Then the earth shook again, though not as violently. It was likely an aftershock.
“My last memory was going to bed on Saturday night. We were in the pitch-dark at first, and we had no idea for how long. We were stuck down in that hole for nearly three days.” Annie turned to look at the remains of the cellar.
“Look at how it was built between two stone buildings. No wonder we couldn’t dig our way out. ”
“The timbers from the cellar door fell on me, and I was hit with falling stones. I’ll bet they stacked them there to keep the door secure.” Cord ate his stew thoughtfully.
“No food or water the whole time,” Annie said. “I was praying with everything I had for God to find us a way out of there, for Him to lead you to us, Josh. And then God sent an earthquake that shook us free.”
Cord nodded as he reached up and gingerly touched the bandage on his head. “Let’s get some sleep, ride to Cornerstone and send the wires, then head home.”
Annie wrapped her arms around him, and they and the others all settled in to rest for a while.
Brody lay there wide awake, his thoughts centered on Hardy and Rombauer. Wherever those two had gone off to, it wasn’t going to be far enough. Brody didn’t intend to let them go unpunished.