"Jerry Oltion & Kent Patterson - Dutchmans Gold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

that she wasn't putting strychnine in his soda made him way ahead of the
average.

So he gave Sarah the short version. "I'm writing a monograph on the lost mine
mythology of the Old West. The Lost Breyfogle is the local variation of the Lost
Dutchman Mine."

"You mean the one in Arizona?" she asked.

"Actually, I've found legends about eighteen Lost Dutchman mines, and I'm sure
there's more. Every Western state has at least one."

"Why is it always Dutchmen?" Peter asked. "I smell prejudice here. Trying to
make us Dutch folks look careless, like we're always losing our mines."

"I don't think Jan's ever lost a mine, but you should see the way he loses
socks," said Frieda.

"What about the Lost Breyfogle?" said Sarah. "Is it a ghost story or something?"

Jan smiled. "Sort of. More like a legend, really, but there are plenty of
disappearances and deaths."

"Oh great! Let's hear it."

Jan leaned toward the stove's flickering light. "Well," he said, "there's dozens
of different stories, but with a few exceptions, they have a lot in common.
First, there's a group going West. Then there's a fight, a storm, a stampede --
some disaster which drives a small party off the beaten trail. With old man
Breyfogle, he and a couple of friends wanted to cut across Death Valley. The
others didn't.

"Anyway, the small group wanders around, totally lost, and finally stumbles onto
a rich gold strike. Sometimes it's nuggets the size of cherries, or ore so rich
hunks of gold shine in the sun. The happy miners gather the gold and put it in a
coffee can, a blue bucket --never black, or white or red, always blue -- or a
Dutch oven. Here, Breyfogle was an exception. He was a giant of a man with huge
feet, so he supposedly filled a boot with gold."

"We're going to get a boot filled with water if we don't get back to the van,"
said Frieda, sniffing the air. "I don't care if it is Death Valley. It's going
to rain."

Jan, lost in his story, ignored her. "There's always a prominent landmark which
marks the mine; an old abandoned cabin or three tall trees. In Breyfogle's case,
it was a twisted tree with a pool of water. Not much of a landmark anywhere
else, but a big deal in Death Valley."

Jan paused, noting that Sarah's face was rapt, her eyes sparkling in the light
from the camp stove. "So now the miners start back to civilization, carrying