David kicked the box and began to swear volubly under his breath.
Sam felt his heart hammer in his throat with disappointment. Crouching down, he pulled out each rock. Under them was one item, a single octagonal glass mason jar with a locking latch and a cork seal inverted on the bottom — its heavy glass lid overcoming its natural buoyancy, and a single gold coin. The coin weighed down a hand-written note.
He picked it up, and ran his eyes across it.
Sorry, Chestnut. I beat you to it. Nothing personal, but gold talks and I never cared about the Covenant — R.M.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
The heaviness of exhaustion sank Sam into the rocky bank by the river as he sat down with Tom, Virginia, and David. He laid back and looked up at the sky, exhaling deeply, searching for inspiration.
Eventually, he stood up and strolled to the edge of the river. There, he rinsed the single gold coin — the sole reward for their efforts.
Wandering back to the others, he sat down to examine the coin. Despite its age, the precious metal had lost none of its luster. He didn’t have latex gloves to protect the old coin from the natural oils and salts on his hands. At this stage, he didn’t care. They’d lost everything anyway. It was never about the gold or the money.
It was about finding the Senator’s son and saving Virginia’s dad.
The head of the coin, also known as the obverse side, was that of Jefferson Davis. Superimposed were the number 20, followed by the word, dollars. A fine indent marred the top edge of the coin with another name, one he hadn’t heard of before, C. Bechtker. At the base of the coin was the date it was minted, 1863. On the reverse side of the coin was an image of an ironclad warship, followed by the Latin words, Deo Vindice — With God as our Protector.
Sam turned the gold coin around in his hand, like a gambler might play with a $5,000 high roller casino chip. A slight grin formed on his lips. “There’s something I don’t get about any of this.”
Sitting cross legged, David said sullenly, “Like who stole our damned treasure?”
“No. We know it was R.M. That’s Robert Murphy, right?” Sam turned to Virginia. “Or, Rachel Murphy, but I can’t see her apologizing to William Chestnut.”
“No. It has to be Robert Murphy,” David agreed. His curiosity abruptly triggered, he asked, “So what don’t you get?”
Sam said, “If Jack Holman retrieved this gold in 1930 or 31 with Robert Murphy, that would have made Murphy…”
“Nearly ninety years old!”
Sam smiled. “I don’t suppose he lived that long?”
David shook his head. “No. He died in 1928.”
Sam cocked an eyebrow. “So, who came here in 1931 and took the gold?”
“Couldn’t Murphy have returned for the gold years earlier?” Tom suggested. “Anywhere since 1863, he could have conceivably made it back here with a small army of laborers and dug up the treasure.”
Sam shook his head. “Not possible.”
“Why not?” Tom asked.
“For starters, Robert Murphy didn’t become rich until later in life, when his son, Rory, started to make it big in the bootlegging business producing rum in Saskatchewan and selling it to Al Capone in the 1920s,” Sam said. “Secondly, there’s still the matter of where Jack Holman found the gold.”
“What gold?” David asked.
“A few days ago, we ran into a man named Yago. He told us he was the son of Jack Holman. He said his father had come to the Ontario wilderness to find gold. Turned out, somewhere out there, in the process of it, he started to work for Murphy. In doing odd jobs, he located the remains of the CSS Mississippi and later returned with a number of gold Confederate coins.”
David interrupted. “How did you know Holman found gold coins, let alone the Confederate ones?”
Sam flicked the coin in between his fingers and smiled. “Because his son, Yago, described it exactly like this one.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” David argued. “I mean, no pilot or anyone else who found the ironclad would have deduced that there was buried treasure a few miles away, hidden beneath an old prospectors mine.”
“That means, Holman must have come here with Robert Murphy.”
David shook his head. “Can’t have. Murphy was long dead by the 1930s.”
“Agreed,” Sam admitted. “But what if Holman came here to fulfill Robert Murphy’s life-long ambition, perhaps a pact he’d made with himself or someone else, to find the treasure.”
“Sure.” Tom, who had been stacking piles of slate to make his version of a castle with a moat, looked menacingly at the empty Confederate chest. “But that still doesn’t answer where the gold coins got to. I mean, if Holman took it, or even Murphy, the coins would’ve turned up somewhere by now, but there’s been no record of them surfacing anywhere.”
“What are you suggesting?” David asked.
Tom sat up straight. “How do we know there was ever any gold in here?”
Sam handed him the gold coin. “This looks real to me.”
Taking the precious metal, Tom ran his eyes across it, then burst into sudden, unexpected laughter. “No, it isn’t. It’s a forgery and a very good one.”
“Whoa. What are you saying?” David asked, his nostrils flaring. “This entire thing our two families have been searching for has been some giant hoax dating back to the Civil War?”
“No. But how much do you know about Confederate coins? Everyone knows the Confederacy printed paper money, but have you ever seen a Confederate gold coin?”
“Hey, you’re right,” Sam said. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”
“No. The gold coin’s real.” David was adamant. “I grew up hearing of the unimaginable wealth of gold Confederate coins from the CSS Mississippi. Why would my father make up such a story? More to the point, why would people be willing to kill for it?”
“Who knows?” Tom said. “All I know is that the Confederacy didn’t mint any of their own coins.”
Virginia looked up from Holman’s journal which she was still industriously reading from start to finish. “I can answer that.”
“Really?” Sam asked, surprised. “How?”
She shrugged. “I collected coins when I was a kid. Some of the most valuable coins were those few which were minted by the Confederacy.”
“Such as?” Tom asked.
“In January of 1861, the Federal government produced about 330,000 silver coins.” She sighed and then paused. “Technically, they were only 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper. Either way, they were termed silver half dollars at New Orleans. Of course, when Louisiana seceded, the state took over the mint and continued production, turning out about 124,000 of the coins.”
“If they made 124,000 coins, wouldn’t eBay and other online auction houses be full of the old Confederate minted coins?” Sam asked.
“No, because it’s impossible to tell the difference.” She put Holman’s book down. “You see they used the original die — the metal block used to cast the blank coin — so their coins still read, United States of America. The Confederate Treasury Department then took over and minted another 963,000 United States half dollars. Coins of this period contained approximately the amount of metal equal to the face value of the coin and these Louisiana and Confederate-produced coins had the same amount of silver as the U.S. produced coins and were thus just as valuable. There is no way to determine if an individual coin was minted by the U.S., Louisiana, or the Confederacy as the same workers used the same die and machines and the coins had the same amount of silver.”
Tom smiled. “Okay, so I was right, the Confederacy never minted any gold coins.”