“We have a map,” Tolman said, and thought it was the understatement of the century.
* * *
Sharp drove. His Glock 21 rode on his hip and his Smith & Wesson M&P340 was on the dashboard. He’d brought his FN Special Police Rifle as well, and it was between the driver’s and passenger seats. Tolman’s SIG was in her purse. The people who’d attacked them near Madill had long arms. They had the money and personnel and resources to track them. They could be waiting up ahead along the winding Texas roads, around any one of these bends.
They headed southwest out of Memphis into the country on Texas 256. It was all tall-grass prairie, sage and mesquite, giving way to short, craggy buttes and small mesas. Cattle grazed inside low barbed-wire fences. Tolman began to feel uneasy with the open emptiness of the landscape and the huge sky. The road bent sharply south and joined Texas 70. No one spoke. Tolman looked at the digital temperature readout on the Explorer’s dash. It was ninety-nine degrees.
They crossed the Red River, which was true to its name, wide and muddy, like most rivers in this part of the country. “It shouldn’t be much farther,” Journey said from the backseat. “The way the map reads, this little tributary of the Red is a few miles south.”
The road curved and bent. Craggy caprock formations rose on both sides. Sharp steered around a curve facing a long, low bridge over a bone-dry riverbed. “Look,” Journey said. “This has to be it. Slow down, Darrell.”
Tolman stared out the window. In the middle of the dry bed of the river to their right, extending as far as she could see on the other side of the bridge, was a fence.
“A fence in the middle of a riverbed?” she said. “That’s not a common thing out here, is it?”
“No,” Journey said.
It was no ordinary barbed-wire cattle fence, either. At least ten feet tall, it was topped with rolls of razor wire. It looked like it belonged in a prison.
Sharp slowed the Explorer to a crawl. On the north side of the riverbed, where the hard-baked ground began to slope upward from the banks, the fence turned at a sharp right angle and ran as far as the eye could see into the western distance.
They crossed the bridge. A white-tailed deer ran along the road to their left, then disappeared under the bridge. Tolman blinked.
Several yards beyond the bridge, a gravel road turned off the highway to the right. Sharp turned onto the road and drove until the vehicle was nose-to-nose with the fence’s gate. An empty guardhouse sat inside the fence. The gate was sealed with a heavy-duty padlock and a length of chain.
All three of them climbed out of the Explorer, moving slowly. Sharp scooped up his rifle, scanning the banks of the dry river and glancing toward the highway behind them. Clearly, he didn’t like having their backs to the road. “I’ll go watch the highway,” he said.
Tolman and Journey trotted to the fence. A white metal sign to the left of the gate read:
PANHANDLE MINING COMPANY, INC.
HALL COUNTY PRODUCTION FACILITY
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
In the bottom left corner of the sign was a graphic representation of a cross.
CHAPTER
30
Journey’s eyes zeroed in on the graphic. “The Silver Cross,” he whispered. Perspiration ran into his eye and he wiped it away.
“It’s a mine,” Tolman said. “By God, Nick, it’s a silver mine.”
She lifted her phone, clicked the camera button, and snapped a photo of the sign, then took more pictures of the fence, the bridge, and the riverbed. Journey said nothing.
Tolman peered through the wire of the fence at the empty guardhouse. “You think they’re closed on Sundays?”
Journey was still silent. He walked along the line of the fence to where it began to slope down toward the river. The gravel road snaked over a rise, and Journey couldn’t see past it. The open country went on and on past this dry river.
“This has to be the base of the cross,” he finally said. “The arms will be up that way, to the west. But they’ll be dry, too. I’m willing to bet that when Father Fournier first saw this place, it was a real river. But other than that…” His voice trailed away as he walked along the fence line toward Tolman and the gate.
“So it’s a mine,” Tolman said.
“Napoleon sent his armies out prospecting for more silver. The mines in Sonora were rich, but he wanted—needed—even more. The silver situation was a crisis, like Lashley said, and while his forces were in the neighborhood, Napoleon was going to make sure they scoured the countryside for more deposits of silver. They must have found them here.” Journey listened to the wind and the ticking of the Explorer’s engine as it cooled. “In Fournier’s journal, he talked about the different men being attached to the unit before it left Sonora, and a couple of ‘native Mexicans.’ They knew the country, and the other men—”
“Engineers,” Tolman said. “Geologists. What do you bet he had teams like this all over Mexico and the Southwest?”
“Including this little piece of the Confederacy,” Journey said. “I just thought of something.… In the letter that Rose was carrying to Jefferson Davis, it didn’t just say Napoleon wanted the Silver Cross. He said he wanted ‘legal possession’ of it. I should have seen that before, but I was too busy thinking it was an artifact, a crucifix or something made of silver. But ‘legal possession’ sounds more like land. He wanted Davis to give the title to this land over to the French.”
“And that would help him solve his silver problem. Would Davis have done that? Wouldn’t that be a big scandal, handing over American soil to a foreign country?”
“Yes to both. But I think Davis would have promised Napoleon anything if it meant French money and troops, and I think the governor of Texas would have gone right along with it. At that time, this part of Texas was Comanche country. That would turn Texas’s ‘Indian problem’ into a French problem. I suspect that if Rose had lived and delivered that letter, this would have been French territory in record time.”
“Must have been a hell of a discovery,” Tolman said.
“‘A treasure greater than may be believed.’ That’s what one French writer said about it.”
Tolman looked toward the gate. “How does it get from your French priest to Rose to Panhandle Mining Company?”
“The question,” Journey said, “is whether Panhandle Mining has been here awhile, or if they found out about it recently, say, since Barry Cable was killed.”
“But where’s the connection?” Tolman said. “Okay, so Napoleon wanted this land to mine the silver. Obviously he didn’t get it, since Rose died. Someone eventually saw the letter and the map.”
“Or, Panhandle Mining discovered it on its own and is a legitimate business with no connection to any of this.”
“You think so?” Tolman asked. Her shirt was sticking to her, after only a few minutes in the sun.
“I don’t know. There’s still no clear connection to April 19 or the Cables or—”
An engine sounded and they turned. Sharp, near the road, gripped his rifle a little more tightly. A dusty blue Chevy pickup truck slowed beside the highway and a single man emerged, smoking a cigarette. “Y’all need some help?” he called in a deep Texas drawl.
Sharp looked over his shoulder. Tolman walked toward the road and the heavyset, balding man. Sharp scanned the horizon.
“Has this operation been here a long time?” she said.
“About four years,” the man said, scuffing a dusty work boot against some stray gravel. “Guess it played out, though, but they seemed to have a pretty good run.” He looked at the Hall County logo on the door of the Explorer. “I don’t think I know you.”
Tolman followed the look. “Sheriff Nichols was kind enough to lend us the truck.”
“Uh-huh. Who did you say you were?”
“We’re with the Research and Investigations Office in Washington, following up on an investigation here.”
“Well, now,” the man said, but his ex
pression had gone stony.
“What do you mean, it played out?” Journey asked.
“Closed,” the man said. “They gave pink slips a few days ago. Way I hear it, everyone cleared out. Left all their equipment, left everything. Just up and walked away.”
“Do you know anything about Panhandle Mining Company?”
The man spat on the road. “They’re not from the Panhandle, I’ll tell you that. I don’t care what the name says. They built places, sort of like dorms, for the workers to live on the property. Didn’t hire very many local people. They liked to brag about making four hundred jobs in Hall County, but hell, all the jobs went to people they brought in.”
“About four years, you say,” Tolman said, glancing at Journey.
“Yeah. They roared away in there, all day, every day—twenty-four seven, I guess is how people like to say it—and must’ve mined it all out in four years. But I hear they were a big producer in the silver market. Real big. Strange outfit.” He looked at Sharp, who stood silent and brooding. The man didn’t seem to be alarmed by the rifle in his hand. He ground out his cigarette on the road under his boot. “What kind of investigation are you doing?”
“Just some follow-up work,” Tolman said.
“Follow-up work. You don’t want to tell some dumb redneck, is that what you mean?”
“Pretty much,” Tolman said. “Except for the ‘dumb redneck’ part. I hadn’t thought of that until you mentioned it.”
The man surprised them by laughing. “You’re not going to find out anything about Panhandle Mining. I’m on the board of the chamber of commerce in Turkey, and we tried to get friendly with them ever since they came in. They paid their membership dues, cosponsored our Bob Wills festival every year … they did the right things, but no one really knew them. You get what I mean?”
Tolman took a few more steps toward the man, leaning on the Explorer. “Who owned this land before they came in?”
“Oh, this was all Jack Hebden’s spread. He ran cattle on it for about fifty years, and his dad before that, and his granddad before that. But Jack’s kids all left here. They didn’t want the place. All three of them moved down to Dallas, and Jack was getting up in his seventies and he was tired of cows, so it didn’t take a lot of convincing for him to sell.”
“You don’t happen to know how we could reach Mr. Hebden, do you?”
“You’ll have to see the Pearly Gates for that. He died less than a year after he moved out of here. Heart attack, just like that.”
“That’s sad,” Journey said. “So it had been in one family for a long time.”
“Oh, yeah,” the man said. “That’s pretty common around here. We had a lot of the big ranches in this part of Texas. The JA Ranch, one of the really famous ones, isn’t too far away. Started by Charles Goodnight himself, and J. A. Adair. And before that, of course, most of this was what they call public domain.”
“Public domain,” Tolman said, and looked at Journey.
“Yeah,” said the man, wiping his forehead. “It was owned by the government.”
They were quiet. Sharp shuffled his feet.
“Nice rifle,” the man said. “A little much to take down deer, but nice. Good range?”
Sharp shrugged.
“If I were to call up Walt Nichols, would he know who you were?” the man said.
“Of course,” Tolman said. “I told you—”
“Yeah, that he lent you the truck. I heard you. Walt’s pretty protective of his equipment, though.”
“Do you know him?”
The man smiled. “My brother-in-law.”
“Go ahead,” Tolman said. “You go ahead and confirm who we are. And thanks for the information.”
“Information? I’m having a little chat by the side of the road, that’s all.”
The man returned to his truck and slammed the door. He lit another cigarette and blew smoke out the window. “I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for,” he said. “And if you find that lady, tell her our tax base is sure going to miss the income.”
“Lady?” Tolman said. “What lady?”
“The boss of Panhandle Mining. At least she was the one who came around for a week once a month to supervise things. She was in charge of the business here. Never saw a woman in charge of something like this before.” He looked at Tolman. “No offense.”
“None taken. What was her name?”
“Diane Corbin. She was from back east somewhere. Pretty tall. I’m six feet and she could look me in the eye. Kind of brown hair, forty-something. Nice looking, I guess, but not a head turner. Like after you talked to her, then you couldn’t really remember what she looked like five minutes later. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do,” Tolman said.
* * *
“So our friend ‘Ann Gray’ gets around,” Tolman said, in the Explorer on the road to Memphis. “She buys a phone in Chicago, mails the map from Michigan, she supervises the mine in Texas. But why give me the letter? Why send you the map? On the phone, she said she didn’t exist. She couldn’t be in the light or something like that. And she said we had everything we needed.” She pounded the car door. “Every time I answer a question, I think of ten more. How is it possible that no one else found this deposit of silver for nearly one hundred and fifty years?”
“Maybe no one looked,” Sharp said.
“What?”
“He’s right,” Journey said. “Remember what our friend back there said? Look around—this is cattle country. Ranching is the business out here. You don’t even see that many oil wells in this area. Texas was never much of a silver-producing state. No one was looking for silver out here. It was good country to graze cattle, and that’s what people did … still do.”
“But that much silver—”
“Yes, that much silver. But there really aren’t many sudden ‘Eureka!’ moments in the real world. Oil gushers don’t come shooting up out of the ground when you’re out hunting, and you don’t see silver nuggets shining in a river while you’re fishing. Napoleon, on the other hand, was looking hard. He had a terrible economy, a foreign war disrupting his supplies, and a shaky foreign policy adventure that he was trying to prop up. He was a desperate man, and he believed Mexico and the American West had what he needed. Since then, people haven’t been desperate for silver. Yes, it’s a good mineral resource, and there’s money to be made, but do people frantically search for it? I don’t think so.”
Tolman allowed herself a small smile. “I need to come sit in on one of your classes sometime, Nick. When you get wound up about something historical, you are a different person.”
Sharp’s mustache twitched and he almost smiled.
Tolman caught the motion. “Don’t you think so, Darrell?”
“Maybe,” Sharp said.
“I need my computer,” Tolman said. “All I can say is, that motel better be air-conditioned.”
* * *
The Travelodge in Memphis was on U.S. 287, the town’s main thoroughfare. They found Sandra and Andrew in the pool, Andrew merrily bobbing up and down, ducking his head underwater, coming up with a mouthful of pool water and blowing it out. Sandra, in a one-piece swimsuit with a UCLA T-shirt pulled over it, was trying in vain to stop him from drinking the water. A uniformed sheriff’s deputy sat nearby in the shade of a pool umbrella. Tolman noticed that the holster on his belt was unsnapped.
“All okay?” Journey said.
“We’re fine,” Sandra said. “This kid loves the water.”
“I guess I should have warned you.”
“It’s okay. It was kind of nice for me to discover on my own.”
Journey looked at her, then leaned down and squeezed her shoulder. “Thanks.”
Sandra shrugged. “Good thing I’m not teaching this summer, either. What did you find?”
Journey filled her in, adding his thoughts on how the Silver Cross had been untapped until four years ago. “That’s a sound conclusion,” she said when he finishe
d. “I don’t know much about West Texas, but I do know that most of the silver in the U.S., at least these days, is in Nevada and Idaho.”
Andrew splashed, drenching his father’s shoes. He laughed.
“Get in and join him,” Tolman said. “I’m going to my room and get busy on my computer. For the moment you have a little downtime. Enjoy it. We don’t know what’s coming next.”
Journey glanced at Sandra. Tolman saw the subtle shift in his face, the hint of a smile. “I might,” he said.
* * *
The room was standard small-town motel, but it was cool. Tolman turned up the air conditioner all the way, booted up her computer, and opened the curtains so she could see the others at the pool. Sharp put his rifle down on the queen-size bed, but didn’t lay down his pistol. “How long, Meg?” he said.
“How long what?”
“How long you figure we’ll be here?”
“I don’t know. I want to get inside that mine, and I want to know who these people are. As long as I have this”—she tapped the computer—“I can work anywhere. I’m not too wild about these wide-open spaces, but for now this is as good a place as any.”
Sharp looked uncomfortable. “I don’t like it.”
“I know, Darrell. We’ll get you back to your place as soon as possible.”
“I miss my house and my road and my hills.”
“I know. And I miss my old deaf cat, too.”
“I wish I could paint.” He sat on the bed. “I wish you could play the piano. If you ever come to my place again, you can play.”
Sharp’s father had been a successful pianist and left Darrell a Steinway concert grand, which filled a room of his tiny house in Arkansas. He’d had it when he and Tolman were students at the Federal Law Enforcement Academy, and their bond had formed around that piano.
“I haven’t played in a few days,” Tolman said. “That would be nice. I promise to come see you when I can.”
Sharp shrugged.
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