By the time he was captured it is believed that he had secured enough powerful signatures to end the Confederacy. This Covenant has not yet been located, but as of this moment, it is considered the most dangerous document ever written. If it’s allowed to reach Washington, it will spell the end of the Confederate States of America.
William Chestnut is intelligent, dangerous, and manipulative. I hereby sentence him to hang at Vicksburg, without delay.
It was then signed by the Senator of Texas, William Simpson Oldham.
Sam secured the leather binder and quickly tucked it in his backpack.
I wonder why David Perry never mentioned anything about a Covenant?
Chapter Fifty-Six
Sam sat down and ran his fingers across his forehead and through his hair. Fascinating as the ship was, there was nothing else of value discovered on board the CSS Mississippi. That she held historical interest was not in doubt. Yet for assisting his group to locate the treasure? Not so much.
Temporarily stumped, he unfolded the map David photocopied of the Confederate Treasury. On a digital tablet he opened up a Geographic Information System, which utilized both satellite images and detailed topographical maps, to view geological, forestry, and topographical information of their surrounding area.
He placed the photocopied map beside the digital topographical map. Then, he studied the two images.
The hand drawn map gave no reference to distance or direction. Whether it was designed like that because its maker was far from a cartographer, or because William Chestnut intended it that way so only he could make sense of it, Sam didn’t know.
At its center was an unnamed boat — presumably the CSS Mississippi. From there, the path led across two small creeks to a large river that split into two. At the fork, a large anvil had been drawn and next to that, a pickaxe and a shovel. His guess was that the anvil indicated some sort of topographical or geological structure that could be used as a point of reference. As for the pickaxe and shovel, perhaps they signified a mine shaft, at the end of which, he hoped to find Confederate gold buried.
Sam glanced at the digital topographical map. There were no creeks nearby and only one large river nearly four miles away. He switched the digital version to geological formations. It depicted depth of the ground in different colors. Similar to a three-dimensional bathymetric map of the ocean floor, this portrayed the deeper depths in a color spectrum, ranging from blues to red, with blue the deepest and red the highest points.
Sam brightened, as suddenly the map looked very much like the one William Chestnut had drawn.
Two otherwise barely noticeable indents on the maps in light blue, indicated the shallow creeks from Chestnut’s 1863 journey. Closer to the mine shaft, in which the Confederate treasure was supposed to have been buried, he spotted two deep ravines, indicating there had once been a conflux of two decent sized rivers.
“That’s definitely our place,” Sam said.
“Well done,” David said. “I knew there would be a reason my father hired you. You’re damned good. Thank you.”
Sam smiled, modestly. “I haven’t found the gold yet.”
“You will though, you will!”
Standing on the ironclad’s deck, Sam set a marker on his hand-held GPS. The last thing he wanted was to lose a ship that could prove to be responsible for some of the major historical events within the Civil War.
Tom turned up, dirty and ruffled. “Look what I found,” he said with a grin. In his hands he was carrying an old revolver. “It’s a Walch Navy 12 Shot Revolver. Walch only ever released 200 of the revolvers, and its design never really took off, but it was a remarkable bit of engineering for its age.”
Sam made a thin-lipped smile. “Was it really?”
“Yes! It was a cap and ball revolver, with six-cylinder chambers, two hammers, two triggers and fires twelve shots!” Tom’s hazel eyes were wide with excitement. “Can I keep it?”
“It’s yours,” Sam said. “You’d better pack it up, we’re leaving.”
Afterward, he, Tom, Virginia, and David started their long trek east. The trail on the map headed due east from the ship, and continued until it reached the western shore of the main river. They were following the lay of the land as it descended gently down what would have been a watercourse. In the past, it may have been the kettle which had trapped the ironclad.
Half a mile out, Sam could hear the river — not the flow, but the chatter of birds by the thousand. The hikers broke through a thicket of dense trees. The moment they did, a cloud of waterfowl burst into the air from the bank nearest them.
From there, the crew followed the river north for about half a mile until the river forked in two, splitting along the base of two valleys. On the map, the image of an anvil was marked on the tip of the spur that separated the watercourses.
Standing on the western shore of the river, they stood staring at the landscape, waiting to make sense of the image on the map.
It was Virginia who saw it first, pointing north. “There!”
Sam followed her indication to a black igneous rock that sat just above the waterline and appeared oddly out of place. The sedimentary rocks around it had been eroded by the river over thousands of years, but the jet-black lump of hard stone had stood almost impervious — only ever being polished by the river’s passing flow. The rock was shaped like a giant anvil, tall and proud, extending below the surface of the water.
“So according to Chestnut’s map, the entrance to the mineshaft should be exactly where we are. I don’t get it, everything lines up perfectly, the rock, the rivers,” Virginia said. “The map shows the tunnel entrance right here, but there’s nothing. Anyone got any ideas?”
Sam pulled out his tablet and started to zoom in on an image using the touch-screen. He looked at a topographical map of the region that Elise had found him after they checked in the exact location of the wreck.
Sam examined the map for a minute, glanced up at the rock formations, and then pointed to the side of the valley. “Assuming William Chestnut and Robert Murphy had some idea about how to draw a map, I’d say right there.”
Virginia shrugged. “Okay mister treasure hunter, you got me, I can’t see a mineshaft entrance. There is nothing there.”
“Well, you wouldn’t,” Sam replied.
“Why not?” Virginia’s eyes focused on the valley’s wall. Sandstone and quartz lined the edge of the river and there were only a few trees nearby. “Where? I don’t see anything.”
Sam grinned. “That’s because the entrance is about thirty feet below us.”
David met Sam’s wild declaration with incredulity. “Below us?”
Sam nodded. “Yes. I assumed you knew. This river was dammed in the early 1930s as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration Deal. Created by the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933 in response to the Great Depression, most of North Dakota started to dam its major rivers for irrigation and, in this case, raising the river’s height by thirty-five feet.”
“You said it was only thirty feet below us?” Virginia pointed out.
“Sure, but I checked. After a series of unusual weather events, the dam’s reported water level is five feet lower than average for this time of year.”
“All right. So that’s great, really great. It’s thirty feet down. Now how are we going to retrieve the treasure?”