"Jerry Oltion - Dutchman's Gold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

bugging him about it all day. Big family secret? I'm one of the family now. So
tell me."

"Oh, Lord. Don't start a historian talking about history." Frieda put her
hands
over her ears. Jan winced. Once she'd have listened to his historical research
for hours. But after sixteen years of marriage, what could you expect? The
fact
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