Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,55

sat down. He sipped the drink he had been carrying in his free hand, and leaned back. It was cool and shady on the porch, enough so that he would have removed his mirror sunglasses had he been alone. Brandon, a true albino, was self-conscious about his pink eyes.

As it was, Kenlaw was all but gawking at his host. The section of log that Brandon had negligently slewed across the uneven boards probably weighed a couple hundred pounds. Dell, who had seen the albino free his pickup from a ditch by the straightforward expedient of lifting the mired rear wheel, appeared not to notice.

“I was asking Dr Kenlaw what it was he was looking for in these mines,” Dell said.

“If mines they are,” Brandon pointed out.

“Oh, they’re mines, sure enough,” the archeologist asserted. “You should be convinced of that, Brandon.” He waved a big hand for emphasis. Red clay made crescents beneath untrimmed nails.

“Who were the ‘ancients’ who dug them?” Dell asked. “Were they the same Indians who put up all those mounds you see around here and Tennessee?”

“No, the mound builders were a lot earlier,” Kenlaw explained. “The mines of the ancients were dug by Spaniards—or more exactly, by the Indian slaves of the conquistadors. We know that de Soto came through here in 1540 looking for gold. The Cherokees had got word of what kind of thieves the Spaniards were, though, and while they showed the strangers polite hospitality, they took pains not to let them know they had anything worth stealing. De Soto put them down as not worth fooling with, and moved on. But before that he sank a few mine shafts to see what these hills were made of.”

“Did he find anything?” Dell wanted to know.

“Not around here. Farther south along these mountains a little ways, though, he did find some gold. In northern Georgia you can find vestiges of their mining shafts and camps. Don’t know how much they found there, but there’s evidence the Spaniards were still working that area as late as 1690.”

“Must not have found much gold, or else word would have spread. You can’t keep gold a secret.”

“Hard to say. They must have found something to keep coming back over a century and a half. There was a lot of gold coming out of the New World, and not much of it ever reached Spain in the hands of those who discovered it. Plenty of reason to keep the discovery secret. And, of course, later on this area produced more gold than any place in the country before the Western gold rush. But all those veins gave out long before the Civil War.”

“So you think the Spaniards were the ones that dug the mines of the ancients,” Dell said.

“No doubt about it,” stated Kenlaw, bobbing his head fiercely. “Maybe that’s been settled for northern Georgia,” Brandon interceded, “although I’d had the impression this was only conjecture. But so far as I know, no one’s ever proved the conquistadors mined this far north. For that matter, I don’t believe anyone’s ever made a serious study of the lost mines of the ancients in the North Carolina and Tennessee hills.”

“Exactly why I’m here,” Kenlaw told him impatiently. “I’m hoping to prove the tie-in for my book on the mines of the ancients. Only, so far I’ve yet to find proof of their existence in this area.”

“Well, you may be looking for a tie-in that doesn’t exist,” Brandon returned. “I’ve studied this some, and my feeling is that the mines go back far beyond the days of the conquistadors. The Cherokees have legends that indicate the mines of the ancients were here already when the Cherokees migrated down from the north in the thirteenth century.”

“This is the first I’ve heard about it then,” Kenlaw scoffed. “Who do you figure drove these mines into the hills, if it wasn’t the conquistadors? Don’t tell me the Indians did it. I hardly think they would have been that interested in gold.”

“Didn’t say it was the Indians,” Brandon argued.

“Who was it then?”

“The Indians weren’t the first people here. When the Cherokees migrated into the Tellico region not far from here, they encountered a race of white giants—fought them and drove the survivors off, so their legends say”

“You going to claim the Vikings were here?” Kenlaw snorted. “The Vikings, the Welsh, the Phoenicians, the Jews—there’s good evidence that on several occasions men from the Old World reached North America long before Columbus set out. Doubtless there were any