Brian Sadler Archaeological Mysteries BoxSet

by Bill Thompson

  “Care for something more civilized?” Jack asked Lucky with a devilish grin.

  “Thought you’d never ask. What have you brought?”

  Jack reached into his pack and pulled out a plastic bottle. “It’s Chivas Regal. If it’s good enough for the Queen I guess it’s good enough for us.”

  Lucky was thrilled. He hadn’t even seen a bottle of Chivas in years. The fine scotch was hard to get outside of major cities in Central America and he didn’t get to the city very often. He felt his mouth go dry and he said, “Just a minute. I’ll get us some glasses and ice.”

  “No ice for me, old man,” Jack replied. “I’ll drink it neat, the British way.”

  The men sipped their drinks. Lucky savored his, leaning back and closing his eyes after each small taste. “Nectar of the Gods,” he murmured. That brought a laugh from Jack.

  Lucky never asked his visitors any specifics about their journeys. He usually had an idea once he talked to them a bit whether they were looking for treasure, or ruins, or graves and bones. Captain Jack was an exception, of course. His reputation preceded him. But still Lucky avoided the subject, waiting until and unless Jack wanted to broach it himself. And it didn’t take long to happen.

  “Well, Lucky, here we are once again.”

  “It’s good to see you again, Captain Jack. How long will I enjoy the pleasure of your company?”

  “We leave the day after tomorrow. I want to give my men a couple of nights’ rest before we move on up. I think I’m really on to something this time, Lucky. I’m going to show you something…I don’t intend to tell you specifics about it, of course, but I am extremely excited about these things I ran across and I want to show you something.”

  Jack walked to the bunkhouse and rummaged through one of the packs. He pulled out a wooden case, the kind you might put a large bible in as a keepsake. He brought it back and sat down. Lucky could see that the box appeared to be very old. There were buckles encircling it; they might originally have been capable of being locked to keep the box secure.

  Arthur Borland stopped talking for a moment. He looked at Brian, patted the wooden box sitting on the table in front of them and said, “This is the box my father showed to Lucky Buncombe.”

  The story continued. Jack had sat down and unbuckled the straps. He opened the lid. Lucky could see that the small box was filled but he couldn’t tell what was there. There was a folded piece of paper on top. When Jack removed it, Lucky thought there was a glint of metal below. Jack closed the lid and held the paper in his hands.

  “I don’t want to bore you with arcane facts,” he began. “Have you ever heard of Don Pedro de Alvarado?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “I’m certain you know who Hernan Cortes was.”

  “Of course. The Aztecs thought he was a god. They accepted him and he obliterated them. He did the same thing with the Maya, as I recall.”

  “Correct. Alvarado was sent by Cortes to conquer the natives in the very area where we’re sitting right now – and he conquered, that’s for sure. His cruelty to the Maya people was unbelievable; Spanish scribes who were part of his entourage duly recorded the carnage. Although it’s never been proven, I’m certain Hernan Cortes himself was on this very mountain in the 1520s.”

  Jack unfolded the paper he had taken from the trunk. It was a map, drawn on a piece of what looked like butcher paper. Lucky noticed it was very detailed, with much intricate writing and drawing. He looked at it without getting too close or trying to appear too interested.

  Jack told Lucky that he had gone to the archives in Seville, Spain, to learn what he could about Cortes, Alvarado and the journeys both men made in Mexico and Central America in the 1500s. Accounts by the scribes who were present noted that the Mayas were easily able to put their hands on large quantities of gold and silver. The gold often had been pounded into thin sheets and decorated. Cortes told the King of Spain that according to Maya legend the sheets of gold were used to adorn the outsides of buildings in a city in the clouds.

  “So you’re looking for Vilcabamba, the lost city of gold?” Lucky smiled. “Haven’t the scholars decided it’s already been found thousands of miles south of here, somewhere in Peru?”

  “Not exactly. I’ve already found gold. Well not actually ‘found’ – I bought two hammered gold sheets from a man who said he was from Oklahoma. Met him in a bar in Belize one evening. He was staying in the Emperor Hotel in Belize City, the most expensive hotel in Central America. And he looked like a bum, to tell the truth. He was pretty secretive but when I told him I was both the Governor-General and that I was interested in relics he offered to sell me a couple of sheets.

  “‘I have plenty,’ the man told me. “I’ll never be able to spend the money I already have, so I’m happy to part with a couple.”

  “I paid him a hundred dollars apiece for the two but first I insisted he tell me where he got them.”

  The man had told Jack he found them in Oklahoma. He had been treasure hunting his whole life and he had found Spanish gold in a creek bed, he said. But this was different – this wasn’t Spanish gold.

  Jack was excited. “The man didn’t know what he had. Now that I’ve been to Seville and seen the 1540 accounts of the scribes and the Governor of Guatemala, I think the Maya themselves carried this gold far, far north to hide it from the Spanish. I think they carried it all the way to Oklahoma.”

  Jack had a flair for the dramatic, especially when he was worked up about a project. “Just wait, my good man. This mountaintop citadel isn’t just about gold. I spent days poring over the Spanish documents, the eyewitness accounts by the scribes who accompanied Alvarado. Late one afternoon when I had decided my search in the Seville library was done, I was preparing to pack up and head back to London. I turned the last page of a sixteenth century volume and found something tucked into the back binder – these two handwritten pages and a crude drawing.” He held them up. “This is a copy of the document and the map I found. If things work out these will lead me to the treasure trove of all time – the legendary ancient library of the Maya.”

  Lucky didn’t respond for several minutes. Instead he sat back and sipped his scotch, thinking that Jack Borland, for all his genteel upbringing and wealth, was exactly like the others – obsessed by the thought that just beyond his grasp there was a gold ring waiting to be grabbed. For Captain Jack the gold ring was this Mayan library. He wanted to be the next Hiram Bingham, the man who had rediscovered Machu Picchu in 1911. He wanted fame but he truly believed fortune would come with it. There would be wealth and notoriety beyond imagination, the explorer firmly believed. They all felt that way, Lucky thought to himself.

  It was known that the Maya reached a very high level of development in literature before the Spanish arrived and burned almost every one of their books, or codices. What the Spanish accomplished in the name of the church cost future generations the opportunity to know these remarkable people. And now there existed only a few codices the authenticity of which were beyond reproach.

  After carefully choosing his words, Lucky finally responded to Jack.

  “I hate to rain on your parade, but isn’t it a fact that the Spanish burned every single thing the Mayans ever wrote, except three or four they apparently sent back to Spain as souvenirs? That’s what I’ve always heard. So how could an ancient library exist? Why has nobody ever heard about it? And what’s so important about a bunch of Mayan codices even if you did happen to locate them?”

  “I don’t expect you to be enthused about this. Believe me, I’ve second-guessed myself a hundred times since I found the document in Seville. I found a two-page letter written by Pedro Alvarado, Governor of Guatemala, to the King of Spain. For some reason it appears the letter was never sent. Instead it was tucked into a book. I won’t tell you what it says but the circumstances of my finding it lead me to believe its contents are true.

  “The books themselves could be the most fascinating hoard ever discovered. I’ve hea
rd my entire life about the missing library at Alexandria, Egypt, and I’ve heard story after story about hidden libraries under the Sphinx at Giza. People have devoted lifetimes to searching for these repositories of information. And this would be no different. The mind cannot grasp what secrets these volumes might contain. We’ve never known how these primitive people with barely any tools mastered the construction of huge pyramids with incredibly heavy stones mounted a hundred feet high. How did they achieve knowledge of time and the heavens, create calendars as accurate as ours, and predict events hundreds of years into the future? Lucky, there literally is no way to say how important these codices could be.”

  “I can only imagine how famous the discoverer would be. I wish you success. You deserve it. I think you may be the most perseverant of all the men I’ve seen.”

  His story about Captain Jack done, Lucky turned to Arthur Borland. “That’s all I know about your father’s last trip. Two days later Jack and his crew of three men walked out of my camp, and from what you tell me, no one’s seen them since.”

  Chapter Six

  In the Monument Club’s bar Arthur Borland picked up the small wooden box lying on the table and excused himself to use the restroom. Brian glanced at his watch – they had been talking for more than three hours. Cell phone usage was prohibited in the bar and dining room so Brian walked to the hallway and quickly called Collette at the gallery, asking her to lock up when she finished for the day since it appeared he likely wouldn’t be back. His thoughts turned to Arthur Borland. He seemed very nervous – his hands shook all the time – but that could simply be some kind of health issue.

  Arthur returned to the table, set the box down and they ordered a last round of wine. “While I was at the Jaguar’s Call, Lucky Buncombe told me my father had left one thing behind when he departed. Jack asked Lucky to store a backpack until he returned. He handed it over to me – as far as I know, that man respected his friendship with Jack Borland enough to resist the urge to look inside the rucksack, so he didn’t know what was in there. When I opened the pack I found the small box with straps that my father showed Lucky. This very box.” He took it from the table.

  Arthur told Brian that the map was missing, presumably because Jack Borland took it up the mountain with him. The box contained the two-page letter intended for the King of Spain, the copy Jack had made from the original in Seville. Underneath that, nestled in the bottom of the box, were two very thin sheets of pure gold, each approximately six inches square. The sheets were marked with various pictographs, similar to hieroglyphs but showing men who appeared to be of Mayan descent, animals, hunting scenes and pictures depicting victories in battle. Opening the box, he handed Brian one of the gold sheets. “Look at the symbols that are at the bottom below the pictographs. I compared this with online images from the Popol Vuh and it appears these are identical to the symbolic writing in it.”

  Brian was familiar with the Popol Vuh, one of the few books written by the Maya that had not been destroyed by the Spanish. Its pages were filled with Mayan drawings and inscriptions.

  Arthur continued. “I’ve had the gold sheets examined both at Oxford University’s archaeological department and the Institute of Maya Studies in Mexico City.” He explained that metals cannot be carbon dated but the professors who looked at the sheets were uniformly of the opinion that both the writing and the artwork were Mayan and very similar to others in museums. The Mexican antiquities expert offered his expert opinion that the drawings on the gold sheets were consistent with other such material and therefore were unquestionably created by the Maya, although the Oxford scholars stopped short of issuing a firm opinion as to whether the sheets were genuine.

  Brian stared at the sheet of gold he held in his hand. Could this be genuine? If so, it was unique, priceless. “I have never seen anything like this in my life. And the guy told Captain Jack he found these sheets in Oklahoma?”

  “Yes. I’m convinced it’s true. The Maya gave the Spaniards everything they wanted to buy freedom for their rulers but the conquistadors executed them anyway. Word had to have gotten around. The people figured out that the Spaniards would kill them for their gold. So they removed the temptation. They moved it far, far away.”

  Chapter Seven

  Ada, Oklahoma

  Summer 1955

  There are people who spend a lifetime searching for gold. Sometimes it consumes them. They can be as normal as the next person but they are driven – devoured – by the idea that someone, sometime, hid a cache of gold and it’s there for the finding.

  Vernon Tippington and Charles Edwards were sitting on the expansive front porch of Edwards’ Southern colonial home, sipping glasses of sweet tea as they talked. Tippington’s homestead abutted the back of Edwards’ four-acre pasture and although not close friends, they were neighbors who talked occasionally. In this small town everyone knew everyone, and everyone certainly knew Charles Edwards, who was a successful real estate developer.

  “Charles,” the man was saying, “I know you’ve heard this from me before, but this time I’m certain about this map I discovered. I’ve been looking for this for twenty years, and I’m certain the mother lode is behind your house, right down there in your back pasture.”

  Edwards sat back in his chair and looked at Tippington. He’d been hearing stories like this from him since 1939 when Charles had built this house. Everyone in this small southern Oklahoma community had heard them and most people thought Tippington was crazy. He was a social misfit, a man some termed a hermit, who had retired from the Oklahoma City-Ada-Atoka railroad, commonly known as the OCA&A, a short line service which ran some 200 miles between the state capital and several outlying communities. The railroad track ran along the east property lines of both Tippington and Edwards and its construction played a part in the treasure stories that kept Tippington searching.

  Behind Edwards’ house in a big fenced pasture ran a creek that everyone said had been there forever. When it rained the creek became a small river, carrying water through boulder-lined walls that rose more than eight feet above the creek bed and created what might be considered a small canyon. This creek was part of a system – it ran all the way from one end of Ada to the other. People often found arrowheads along its banks, sure signs that Indians had camped here in the past.

  When the railroad was built in the 1920s, massive earthmoving equipment created a large hill nearly twenty feet above the low-lying pasture. The train tracks were laid on top of it to make the tracks straight and avoid unnecessary dips in the landscape. A culvert large enough for hobos to camp in had also been built to carry the creek water eastward from Edwards’ pasture under the tracks. As heavy equipment prepared the railroad bed the workers dislodged boulders far too heavy for a man to move. The walls lining the creek bed were altered as machines moved rocks that had stood in one place for centuries. Progress was usually accompanied by change. In this case the sides of a creek where Native Americans once camped were realigned as bulldozers shifted giant rocks.

  There had been talk of treasure along this small river for well over a hundred years. There was a tale about the Spanish conquistador Coronado; according to legend, he came through Oklahoma and buried a cache of gold here. Others said it was Jesse James’ loot from stagecoach robberies. Another mentioned Mayan chieftains who sent parties from Central America far, far north – as far as Oklahoma – to hide gold from Spanish conquerors.

  No one had ever found anything and most people considered themselves too normal, too sane, to go treasure hunting. But not Vernon Tippington. He had looked at old railroad records from the time the tracks were laid and he knew the workers had found Spanish coins dating to the 1500s. A strange sheet of gold with writing on it had turned up too. There was no explanation how the things got here and the stories had been forgotten by just about everyone. Except Vernon.

  “Vernon, how much time are you going to spend on this frivolity? You’re wasting your time and energy on a wild goose chase.”

/>   Tippington looked at him wearily and responded, “It’s my time to waste. I’ve got my pension from the railroad and some day just you wait and see – some day this is all going to pay off.”

  “OK, and I suppose just like last time you won’t let me look at your map. Right?”

  Vernon Tippington’s eyes opened a little wider, and he leaned back in his chair, involuntarily moving away from Edwards. “No…no, it’s my map,” he stammered, like one child keeping a toy away from another.

  Charles Edwards smiled. “All right, then. Let’s see your contract.”

  Tippington produced two sheets of typing paper, one a carbon copy. There were two typewritten paragraphs. He handed both to Edwards.

  “Vernon, I’m going to do you a big favor this time. I don’t want half of what you find. If I had half of what you’ve found so far, I’d be right where I am now, with absolutely nothing. You can dig on my property. If you find something worth a hundred dollars or more, you owe me a hundred dollars. That’s it.”

  Edwards laughed, took a pen from his pocket and jotted down a few sentences outlining the deal he wanted. He signed both copies and tossed the papers back across the table to Tippington. “I think you’re wasting your entire life on this.

  Vernon signed both pages, kept one for himself, and rose. “You’ll be sorry you didn’t take a piece of the action, Charles. I’m certain this time that I’m onto the payoff. If I were a betting man I’d say it’s Spanish gold. I can feel it in my bones.”

  Charles Edwards went inside the house as Ella, the family’s housekeeper, removed the glasses from the porch table where the men had sat. After she went back inside, the hedge next to the porch rustled loudly. Billy Edwards, Charles’ 9-year-old son, emerged from his hiding place and ran over to talk to his best friend and across-the-street neighbor, Tommy Albert. The search for gold on their property was on again. And Mr. Tippington was sure this time!