“Well, Charlie Snipes sure had me fooled,” said the captain. He twirled the ice in his glass—it was the first time I’d seen him drink whisky, but there was no denying that the occasion called for it. “I knew he had an appetite for gambling. Not that I hold that against anybody, as long as the crew doesn’t get in games with the passengers—that looks bad, even if it don’t cause trouble, and I’ve seen that more than once, too. But I didn’t care about his playing a game or two on shore, as long as he stuck to business when he was on the boat. What I didn’t know was how deep in the hole he’d got himself, and how desperate for money it made him.”
“Desperate enough to kill two men he thought stood in the way of his getting hold of hidden treasure,” said Mr. Clemens. He shook his head. “I know how money can look to a man over his head in debt, and there’ve been times I’ve been tempted to claim that hidden gold for myself—except it’s just a drop in the bucket compared with what I owe. If I’ve still got to get ninety-nine percent of it honestly, I might as well get it all honestly.”
“And you aren’t the kind of man to knife anybody to get it,” said the captain.
“No . . . slow poison’s always been more my style,” said Mr. Clemens, laughing.
I had a sobering thought. “Let’s just hope that, after all this time, the money really is there. It would be a terrible comedown to find that it was all a hoax, or that somebody else found it years ago, considering how much effort you’ve put into finding it.”
“My effort is the least of it, Wentworth. The renegade soldiers who hid the gold thirty years ago probably killed a few men to get it before Ritter caught up with them. Snipes killed two more, and he’s likely enough to end his own life at the end of a rope. It would indeed be a cruel irony if they’d all died for nothing. But we’ll know soon enough.”
“Aye, that we will,” said Captain Fowler. “And you’ll have a few stout friends with you when you go to find it, to make sure it doesn’t claim one more victim. Can you tell us now where it was really hidden? Or was it somewhere near Napoleon after all?”
“Not in Napoleon, no,” said Mr. Clemens. “It was in Helena, Arkansas. High ground, above the flood lines—if the money’s not there, it won’t be the river’s fault.”
“An easy day’s run downriver,” the captain said. “We’ll know the answer soon enough, then, when our business in Memphis is over.”
“This is the place,” said Mr. Clemens. We had stopped at an abandoned building on the west side of Helena, Arkansas. Captain Fowler and Tiny Williams were with us, and we had hired a colored porter with a wheelbarrow down at the dock where the Horace Greeley was tied. But the “secret” of our treasure hunt was out, and our little group was swelled by some thirty spectators, not counting the local sheriff’s deputies, who had been tipped off by the Memphis police. We had managed to lose most of the newspapermen, who had swarmed over the boat while we were docked in Memphis. But quite a few of the more astute passengers (including Miss Cunningham, who seemed to have forgiven me my scandalous behavior now that my motives had become clear) had seen through the ruse of a luncheon date with a local businessman, and had followed our exploration party up the hill. At first I was annoyed at the large numbers, but Mr. Clemens just laughed. “The cat’s out of the bag, however you figure it,” he said. “At least we can be sure nobody’s going to rob us, with so many spectators.”
It was another blazing-hot day, and the late-afternoon sun had beaten down hard upon our heads as we climbed the steep hill to the old livery stable where Mr. Clemens said the gold was hidden.
“Are you sure this is it?” said the captain, mopping his forehead with an oversized handkerchief. “I don’t see any thing to mark this place out from any of a hundred other buildings in the state of Arkansas.”
“It’s just as Ritter described it,” said Mr. Clemens. “I put the exact description of the place in my book, except for moving it to a different town and changing the street names. Let’s go around to the north side of the building.” We clambered over a decaying rail fence into a weed-filled yard and stood facing the stone foundation. The crowd filed in behind us.
“At least there’s a little shade here,” said the captain.
“We shouldn’t be long in any event,” said Mr. Clemens. He walked to the northwest corner of the building and pointed to the foundation. “We’ll either find the money or an empty hole where it used to be. Wentworth, see if you can move that stone. Fourth row from the top, third from the corner.”
I knelt down and peered at the foundation. The stones were large and thinly covered with moss; the one Mr. Clemens had indicated was about the size of my head. I tried to get a grip on the stone, but the moss made it slippery, and the chinks between stones had filled with dirt over the years. I took out my pocketknife and scraped the stone to get a better grip. It seemed loose, but I couldn’t quite get my fingers between it and its neighbors. “The foundation must have settled,” I said. “Did we bring along some sort of pry-bar?”
“Got it right here,” said Tiny Williams. “Let me give ’er a try.” He knelt beside me, and I slid over to make room for him. He used the end of the bar to scrape away more moss, then put its point between the stone and its left-hand neighbor and pushed. The stone came slightly forward, and a little pile of dirt tumbled out of the crack. “There, she’s moving,” said Williams. “Stand back, everybody—we don’t want to bring this whole wall down on you.”
Williams and I put our hands to the stone, and now it moved more freely. Another little avalanche of dirt and pebbles came down, and then the stone was out. Despite Williams’s warning, Mr. Clemens and the captain pressed close behind us, peering into the cavity behind the stone. “Can you see anything in there?” said Captain Fowler.
“I could if you all weren’t blocking the light,” said Mr. Clemens. “Here, boys, let me see what’s in there. I’ve been waiting over twelve years for this.” We stepped back, and he knelt down and reached into the cavity. “This is the place!” he crowed. He pulled out a fistful of gold pieces. The spectators cheered at the sight, and pressed in to see the treasure up close.
“Lordy, mister, I sure wish I knowed that was here,” said the porter. “Walked past this old stable every mornin’ and every evenin’ since I was a little boy, and never once thought I was goin’ past a gold mine. What you gone do with all that money?”
“I’ve owned my share of gold mines, and couldn’t afford to keep ’em,” said Mr. Clemens. “This is the first time I’ve ever pulled real money out of a hole in the ground. But it’s not mine to keep—I promised to give it to a young man in Germany, and that’s what I’m going to do with it.”
“That’s mighty big of you, Sam,” said the captain. Tiny Williams was now kneeling by the hole, passing out big handfuls of gold pieces to the porter, who piled them in his wheelbarrow with a stunned expression on his face. “How much money is it supposed to be?”
“Ten thousand dollars is what the German claimed,” said Mr. Clemens. He’d pulled out his corncob pipe and was filling the bowl. “We’ll count it when we get it all back to the boat. But I wouldn’t even want to think about keeping it. Too many men have already been killed over it, and Charlie Snipes will be one more, when they finally hang him. I want nothing more than to get it out of my hands and to its rightful owner as quickly as possible.”
“That doesn’t seem much reward for all the trouble and danger you’ve been through to find it,” I said. “What do you get out of it?”
“What do I get out of it?” Mr. Clemens thought for a moment, then smiled. “I get the satisfaction of helping a man who needs the money more than I do, of bringing a long and difficult task to a successful conclusion . . . and best of all, of having a story that’ll have the audiences on the edges of their seats all the way from here to New Orleans!”
About the Author
Peter J. Heck was born and raised in Chestertown, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After earning a degree in English at Harv
ard, he taught college-level English, managed an air freight office in New York, and sold musical instruments in a store on Long Island before becoming a full-time freelance writer and editor in 1983. His book reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and from 1990 to 1992 he was a science fiction editor at Ace books.
In addition to Mark Twain, whose books he has read ever since he can remember, Heck’s interests include music (he plays blues and country guitar), chess, baseball, travel, and computer bulletin boarding. He has one son, Dan, from a previous marriage. He currently lives in Brooklyn, with his wife, Jane Jewell, two cats, several guitars, and a constantly growing library.
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