but he wasn't talking. Neither was Vala. What had happened to the camaraderie of the night before? The only bright spot was that the pack horse seemed less lame.
Some time later, Vala, obviously attempting to lighten everyone's mood, began singing about them being off to see the Wizard of Oz. Bram, brooding some himself by then, thought she'd chosen the perfect tune. He'd never yet seen an authentic treasure map and he'd seen dozens.
Mokesh's map would prove to be as fake as the "wonderful wizard" Dorothy and her friends were off to see.
He was willing to bet that no gold, no silver, no jewels, waited for them at the spot marked X. In fact, he thought they'd find nothing at all.
Chapter 11
The trail they followed was the steepest yet, the horses laboring uphill for what seemed an endless time. When they finally came out onto a more or less level area, Bram called a halt and they dismounted.
"Let's see that map again," he said to Davis.
Davis extracted the map from a saddle bag, handed it to him and then stood close to peer at it with him. Vala joined them to stare down at the deerskin.
"This is it," Bram declared after a few minutes study. "The end of the road."
"You mean the treasure is here?" Davis asked, looking around eagerly.
"As far as I can tell." Bram rolled the map back up and handed it to Davis. "Better put this away before we go haring off to search."
Davis made the run to the saddlebag and back in record time.
"Listen up," Bram announced. "No splitting the search party. We three stick together at all times. Is that clear?"
No one objected.
"We'll start to the far left and search the outer areas in a clockwork rotation," he went on. "Don't any of you figure it's going to be easy to find whatever it is we're searching for. Look sharp."
They'd covered half the outer rim when Davis cried, "My foot hit something."
Bram knelt and dug around a metallic chunk with a small collapsible spade from his gear. Vala held her breath as he eased the object free. What was it?
"I'd say this is the broken-off end of a pick-ax," Bram announced. "Whether or not there's any gold here, somebody had a fling at digging for it."
Judging from the broken point of the pick-ax, which resembled some old relic, Vala figured the digger had been here a long time ago. She held out her hand and Bram gave her the piece of metal.
Vala intended to save it--just in case. If nothing else turned up, at least Davis would have a souvenir from the trip.
As they went on, they came to a mound of broken rocks. Glancing up, Vala saw the rocks had come from a shattered spire thrusting high above.
She noticed Bram follow her gaze. "Remember, the Superstitions are of volcanic origin," he said. "There are a couple of great cones down at the west end."
Davis made a sweeping gesture, "You mean a volcano made all this?"
Bram nodded. "A long time ago."
"Everything interesting happened before I was born," Davis complained. "Like the dinosaurs and all."
"Then I guess you'll just have to find something interesting to do with your life," Vala told her son.
"Like find the treasure," Davis said.
As they continued around the rim, Davis spotted what looked like it might be the opening to a mine, but it turned out to be no more than a shallow hole in the rock.
They finished the circle without finding anything else. "With our next clockwise sweep," Bram said, "try hard to spot anything unusual."
He was saying this, Vala figured, because once they finished making the second, inner circle, there was no other place to search. Find it this time or it isn't here.
She hadn't allowed herself to really believe there'd be gold at the end of the journey, but she'd hoped all along she'd be proved wrong. Turning the broken piece of metal over in her hands, she resigned herself to this fragment being all they'd discover.
Near the center of the area rose a rounded dome-like formation with smaller rocks scattered around it and some larger ones on top. On the far side, a large pile of rocks suggested something had broken off at one time or another and slid down here in pieces.
A different colored rock caught Vala's eye, whitish instead of the red-brown prevailing color. Curious, she reached into the pile to try to pull it loose to examine it but found what she'd grasped was the