Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston Read Free Book Online

face-just up
Tyrannosaur
Canyon
-had unseated what looked like a cave. He climbed up and crawled inside. It was a short, narrow tunnel with pick marks in the walls. He followed it until it opened up into a chamber. He just about died when his candle lit up a whole wall of crude gold bars stamped with the Lion and Castle. He pocketed one and rode back to Abiquiu. That night he got drunk in the saloon and like a damned fool started showing the gold bar around. Someone followed him out, shot and robbed him. Of course, the secret died with him and the gold bar was never seen again."
    He spit a piece of tobacco off his tongue, "All these treasure stories are the same."
    "You don't believe it."
    "Not a damned word." Peek leaned back and rewarded himself by lighting his pipe afresh and taking a few puffs, waiting for comment.
    "I have to tell you, Ben, I talked to the man. He found something big."
    Peek shrugged.
    "Is there anything else he might have found of value up there besides the El Capitan hoard?"
    "Sure. There's all kinds of possibilities up there in terms of minerals and precious metals. If he was a prospector. Or maybe he was a pot-hunter, digging up Indian ruins. Did you get a look at his equipment?"
    "It was all packed on the burro. I didn't see anything unusual."
    Peek grunted again. "If he was a prospector, he might have found uranium or moly. Uranium is sometimes found in the upper member of the Chinle Formation, which crops out in
Tyrannosaur
Canyon
,
Huckbay
Canyon
, and all around lower Joaquin. I looked for uranium back in the late fifties, didn't find squat. But then again I didn't have the right equipment, scintillation counters and such."
    "You mentioned
Tyrannosaur
Canyon
twice."
    "Big damn canyon with a million tributaries, cuts all the way across the Echo Bandlands and up into the high mesas. Used to be good for uranium and moly."
    "Is uranium worth anything these days?"
    "Not unless you have a private buyer on the black market. The feds sure aren't buying-they've got too much as it is."
    "Could it be of use to terrorists?"
    Peek shook his head. "Doubt it. You'd need a billion-dollar enrichment program."
    "How about making a dirty bomb?"
    "Yellow cake, even pure uranium, has almost no radioactivity. The idea that uranium is dangerously radioactive is a popular misconception."
    "You mentioned moly. What's that?"
    "Molybdenum. Up there on the backside of
Tyrannosaur
Canyon
there's some outcroppings of Oligocene trachyandesite porphyry which has been associated with moly. I found some moly up there, but they'd already high-graded the deposit and what I found didn't amount to day-old piss in a chamber pot. There could be more-there's always more, somewhere."
    "Why do they call it
Tyrannosaur
Canyon
?"
    "There's a big basaltic intrusion right at the mouth, weathered in such a way that the top of it looks like a T. Rex skull. The Apaches wouldn't go up it, claim it's haunted. It's where my mule spooked and threw me. Broke my hip. Three days before they medevacked me out. So yeah-if it isn't haunted, it should be. I never went back."
    "What about gold? I heard you found some back there."
    Ben chuckled. "Sure I did. Gold is a curse to all who find it. Back in '86 I found a quartz boulder all spun through with wire gold in the bottom of Maze Wash. Sold it to a mineral dealer for nine thousand dollars-and then I spent ten times that amount looking for where it came from. The damn rock had to have come from somewhere but I never did find the mother lode. I figure it somehow rolled all the way out of the
Canjilon
Mountains
, where there's a bunch of played-out gold mines and old mining towns. Like I said, gold is a loser. I never touched the stuff after that." He laughed, drew another cloud of smoke from his pipe.
    "Anything else you can think of?"
    "This 'treasure' of his might have been an Indian ruin. There are a lot of Anasazi ruins back up in there. Before I knew better I used to dig around some of those old sites,