Chapter 19

“Damn, Paul!” Mick spoke, looking around.

I slapped the mules with the reins, and we drove to the area between the hogan and the stable hogan. Thumper was paying attention and had his ears straight up in the air. When I stopped, I got down and undid the team, leading them to the stable for their water, food and brushing. Rory followed with his horse.

“Paul, this is amazing! Was all this here when you found it?”

“Yeah, but it was all overgrown with heavy brush and trees. We cleared all of the area along the riverbank and then ... let’s finish this first. It’ll be easier to show you everything.”

Mick joined us and brushed one of the mules while I did the other. I explained how we had fresh water in the stable hogan and how the small stove kept the whole place nice and warm in the winter.

When we were done, I took my brothers to my home. I showed them everything we had, from the books to the maps. That was when I dropped the big one on them.

“My lawyer in Fountain City is checking to be sure it’s real, but ... um ... I have a land grant signed by the King of Spain. If it is legal, I own a big chunk of Colorado and a smaller chunk of Utah. If that is the case, then I’m going to offer all of the land in the grant to the native nations and the two states and just keep ownership of the whole plain. We filed a homestead on the main 160 acres of the plain, so that part won’t be in doubt.

“The river runs down from the mountains and here on the plain the river bed is actually a shallow gorge made up of a lot of gold bearing quartz. The Utes and the Spanish mined it back in the 1700’s until smallpox killed off most of the people. The Indians won’t have anything to do with the area. Every tribe all the way to the Pacific believe it is evil and cursed land.”

“Wait, wait, wait, go back,” Rory was catching up. “You own Utah and Colorado?”

“No, just a chunk of them. The really important thing is the gold. Come on.”

I walked out the door and led them to the old riverbed. The gold quartz was shining in the sunlight. I pointed out the gates, now the earthen dams, that redirected the river, and the places I had already mined. They could see that I’d barely scratched the surface of the gold deposits there.

“Right now, Opal Anne and I are probably the richest people in the Western US. We are going to continue to share with you as we have, but there are some things we need to do first.”

“Why do I have a feeling that this is going to have something to do with our wives and trading?” Rory asked.

“Because it does. Mick, Rory, I want you to know that I trust you two completely but look at this. Look at the amount of gold and tell me that Raylene or Betty Mae could keep this secret. They might, but I know that you two WILL keep the secret.”

“Mick, he’s got a point,” Rory admitted.

“Yeah, I know,” Mick replied thoughtfully.

“Let’s take a walk and I’ll show you everything else,” I said.

I led my brothers on a tour of the plain. I took them across the river and explained how we changed the river’s course. We walked to the office and I explained the Spanish books and the one that was written in a language no one knew.

“Opal Anne can read Spanish, but we have no idea about this one,” I said handing the book to Mick. He wrinkled his brow, looked at the words, and spoke, “В журнале... ‘The Journal of... ‘ that’s all I can read,” I must have looked completely stunned. “We had a Russian soldier with us for a while. I recognize the first three words from a journal that he had.”

“Russian?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Well that makes sense,” I said. “The Russians were here. Opal Anne read in another log that after the gold was used to pay for some war in Europe, the Spaniards were selling gold to Russia. So, this must have been the personal journal of a Russian working with the Utes and the Spaniards. I wish I could read it.”

“Maybe we can find someone who can read it in Denver,” Mick suggested.

“Maybe,” I said. “But we have time to wait and I don’t want to let any portion of the secret out anytime soon.”

I showed my brothers the other hogans and then led them to the hogan that was going to be our new home. Rory and Mick were both duly impressed with the view. The three of us stood in awe of it.

“When I saw this view the first time it was all I could do to tear myself away,” I said.

“Makes you wonder if it’s possible to leave this place,” Mick said.

I looked at my brother and told him the news. “Opal Anne and I have talked, and we won’t be leaving and moving to Denver.”

“Not leaving? What about the idea of the plot of land and the houses?” Mick asked.

“Those are still doable. You’ll each be rich in your own right, and you’ll both still get a portion of the gold we take out of here. You can still find a big plot of land and build a couple of houses. But Opal Anne and I are staying here.”

Mick looked at me and I could see his eyes watering up.

“I need to talk to Rory. Would you excuse us for a moment?”

“Sure.”

I walked away wondering what Mick was going to do. I walked out past the woods to the edge of the plain, where it dropped off like a grassy cliff. From here there was a clear view of the valley and the mountains beyond it. After seeing war and the horrible and evil things that men can do to other men, I wasn’t sure anymore if there was a God. But it suddenly struck me that, if there was a God, this would be the view of heaven he saw walking out his front door every day. Then it also occurred to me that I owned it.

“Paul?” I turned to find two weeping men facing me.

“We’re sorry,” Rory sobbed. “We really are. Please don’t send us away. We won’t trade our wives anymore. Honest.”

I looked back and forth at two grown men shedding tears of shame. I’d never seen either of them cry. The times when our father had brought them back from a whooping behind the shed, they weren’t crying. When he was a little kid and his dog died, Rory didn’t cry. Even at the Surrender, Mick didn’t shed any tears.

“Paul, I know that what we’ve done has destroyed your trust in us, but if you’ll give us another chance, we’ll be the best brothers you would ever want.”

I stood there, stunned.

“Mick, Rory, this has nothing to do with any of that. Before Opal Anne and I found this place, we were all set to move to Denver next Fall, but then we found this place,” I waved my arm at heaven, “and we just can’t leave. Opal Anne wants to have another baby up here and ... I guess I’ve never been a city sort of man.”

“But Paul, the family?” Rory said.

“Rory, the family will always be. Now that I think about it, maybe for me, right now, the O’Dell clan is me Opal Anne and Pauli. During the war the O’Dell clan was the three of us, but I have a wife that I love more than anything I could have ever imagined. Then Pauli came along, and I found someone I could love even more. This has nothing to do with loving you two any less.”

My brothers stood there sniffling, and I finally couldn’t take it anymore and joined them in tears and the three of us embraced. I broke apart from them after some time and waved at them to follow as I walked into the hogan Opal Anne and I would be calling home. I sat in one of the chairs and waited for them to join me.

“So,” Mick said walking in. “Just what are we up here for?”

“I wanted to tell you about the gold, without your wives knowing about it. I trust you two with my life and with the lives of Opal Anne and my daughter, but not those women. I’m sorry if that bothers you, but Opal Anne feels the same way. Since we’re going to stay here, I need you two to help me to cut a path from this hogan here to the edge where the plain drops off and one from this hogan to the next one. That one will be the new stable.”

“OK, we can do that.”

“Then I need to rig up a way to plow or dredge the old riverbed for the gold in there.”

“That’s easy, but isn’t the gold inside quartz rock?”

“Yeah, but the quartz is really fractured. A plow or dredge will pull up a lot of it. To be honest, I don’t know how deep it goes. The Spaniards mined the river further back towards where our property starts and at some points around there, the river seems to be ten to fifteen feet deep for maybe twenty-five to thirty yards in length, and for the entire width of the river.”

“My God! That’s a huge amount of gold,” Mick muttered.

“Remember from what Opal Anne has read in the miner’s journals, they paid off all the costs of a war in Europe with the gold taken from here. Then they began to sell it to the Russians until the smallpox hit and everyone died.”

“Smallpox? I mean I thought you said that earlier, but I was a little overwhelmed at the time.”

“Yeah, Rory. That’s why I’m not worried about Indians. The word has gone out that this plain is crawling with evil and is cursed. None of the known tribes or even the renegade ones will come near here.”

“I was going to ask about that,” Mick said. “What about bad guys like we’ve run into on the trail to Fountain City?”

“What about them?”

“Can you and Opal Anne hold off a crew of ten or twenty rough men?” Mick asked with concern.

“Opal Anne is a crack shot. I’m not bad. I plan to cut a winding path through the trees to make straight shots impossible. I’m going to plant dynamite in various places that I’ll make look like good places for the bad guys to hide if we’re shooting at them. Then I can cluster some of them up and blow them to hell.”

“You seem to have developed a defense plan. What are you going to do when you have to ship the gold out?”

“We’re rich enough now that I can hire a security company like Pinkerton to haul the gold directly to Denver for processing. We’ll ship in our supplies as well. The family will still go to Fountain City to see Daisy and Doc and the Sheriff. We also need to keep in touch with the banker and lawyer who are handling our money.

“And if anyone braces us on the trip to town, I’m sure Opal Anne will shoot them before I can ask what they want.”

My brothers laughed at that, because they knew she would.

“Hello the camp! KABOOM! Who’s there?” Rory said still laughing.

“Let’s look at the path I want to cut and get started.”

My brothers both nodded and stood.

“You’ll have to come to Denver, for Christmas, you know,” Mick said.

“I know. We will.”

At the end of the first day we had marked out the path through the trees to the new stable and to the mining hogan, which will be what we’ll call our former home. Rory thought up a way to drag the gold laden quartz from the riverbed and over the rest of the week he developed it. He also designed a rig that I could build. We would use the mules to drag the plow-like thing we found in one of the stone buildings and pull up the gold quartz.

Mick and I cut the trees and used the mules to haul the trunks clear so Rory could strip them of their branches. Then we hauled the bare trunks into place to make stronger windbreaks for the snow season. They also gave us defensible positions if we should need to stand and fight.

After walking around a large portion of the plain, Mick and I plotted out how we would attack the plain if we were to be in an attacking mood. We mapped out the routes that troops would take and where horses would come into play. Then we set up our defensive positions. Mick and I plotted out where I would plant the dynamite with the blasting caps I had ordered. It would take a while to get them in and people would soon know that I was blasting on the plain, but they wouldn’t know what I was blasting until they got blasted.