Dark Tales Of Lost Civilizations by Eric J. Guignard (Editor) Read Free Book Online Page B

leading them both—he would make a careful map of the crevice and the surrounding countryside. Head back to civilization. Live like a king. Tell no one. If he ever needed more, he had the map. Only Lyddy would know.
    Because killing a man who resembles your twin and popped out of nowhere can’t be a crime. If no one else knows about a man living, then no one else should care if he stops.
    The dead body was right where he had left it. Both Clayton and Lyddy studied it for a long while.
    “If that isn’t the damnedest,” said Clayton.
    The same frayed threads were on the jacket cuffs. The same scar on the temple from when Lyddy fell down the kitchen stairs at six years old. The only difference was the body had no lip or chin whiskers. Like Clayton.
    Lyddy pulled off the hat. The dead man’s scalp was smooth and hairless.
    “Perfect match except he’s bald,” said Lyddy.
    Clayton shrugged. “Any morning every man in creation decides whether to shave his face or not. This guy just kept going.”
    It bothered Lyddy. He and Clayton grabbed the corpse’s collar and dragged it inside a building, not the one with the statue but another empty hat box. His hand brushed its cheek and he shuddered—the skin was cool and dry and raspy, like very fine sandpaper.
    They began the extraction. Lyddy had a sack with a drawstring. In went the golden kachina. Then they searched the other buildings, scoring the adobe beside the doorway when a chamber was clear. There were other items too, buffalo hides and eagle feathers and woven blankets, junk things. They ignored those. Only gold interested them. They found other kachinas all right. Some bigger, some smaller. Not in every house. But in enough.
    Lyddy and Clayton filled the sack with as much as it could carry without the seams tearing, their coat pockets too, then trudged all the way out and up to dump it. Lyddy thought maybe the figures would vanish in the sunlight, but no—they were real. The gold blazed in the light, dancing like reflected water on the surrounding rock.
    “It sparkles, all right.” Clayton winked. “But not like Jenny Allen’s eyes.”
    Lyddy turned on him, hands balled. “Why you gotta bring her up again?”
    Clayton patted the mule’s muzzle. “Little point throwing punches. I was there too.”
    “No. You weren’t,” said Lyddy. Then: “What kind of life could I have given her? Coaxing weeds from the dirt. She deserved better.”
    “You don’t know it would’ve always stayed that way. She would have married you poor or sick.”
    Lyddy said, “Money is the only thing that matters in this lifetime. Women, marriage—they all follow after.”
    The two left the gold with the nervous old stallion and mule and went down to liberate more.
    “You know where I reckon we are?” said Clayton, as they returned along their circuit.
    Lyddy said nothing. He was still hot from before. But he had been puzzling the same question in his head. Quivira .
    Clayton laughed and clapped his hands. “In the Year of Our Lord 1539, Coronado traveled north from Mexico into the Territories. Searching for the Seven Cities of Gold.”
    “He found the pueblos of the desert but no gold,” said Lyddy.
    “The Indians he talked to pleaded ignorance. Eventually he met an Indian guide who promised to take him to Quivira, one of the seven. He led Coronado’s expedition into Kansas.”
    There they found a place the guide called Quivira, Lyddy thought. But it was only more mud huts and naked savages.
    “Right. It struck Coronado during the long weeks of plodding over hill and canyon that if he had a city of gold, a good way to protect said city would be to lead plunderers away from it with promises of taking them to it.”
    “Which, Coronado surmised, had happened to him.”
    “Exhausted, depleted—hornswoggled—Coronado gave up the hunt.”
    “Returned to Mexico.”
    “But first he ordered his men to strangle the guide.”
    And here Lyddy was. Not the Quivira Coronado found