Dry Bones: A Walt Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson Page A

picked up one of the boards and stood. “There’s a legend . . .”
    She laughed. “What is it with you westerners? There’s always a legend.”
    “Supposedly there were three prospectors who snuck into this area after it had been cordoned off by the military as Indian territory. As the tale goes, they found gold, a lot of it, but as is human nature, they then fell in on each other. After the altercation, the only one left was a Swede by the name of Jonus Johanson.”
    “He would be the dead one?”
    I examined the board in my hands, running my thumb across the ridges made by the engraved letters. “Nobody knows what happened to him, but a man traveling alone, supposedly with a lot of gold, surrounded by scoundrels and profiteers of every stripe . . . I wouldn’t think his odds were very good, but it’s just a story.”
    She glanced around, I guess half hoping to see a timber-supported opening in the hills. “If those men found the mine, then it must be true.”
    “Not really—it’s probably just an old, shallow-shaft coal mine, a rarity in these parts; but still, as Dorothy Johnson once said, ‘when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’” Nudging my chin toward the Bighorns, I started back toward the Bullet. “If they found gold, it would’ve been closer to the mountains, but actually there’s really not much geologic evidence of any gold anywhere in the area.” I opened the door and looked back at the two of them. “Fool’s gold, I’d say.”
    “Have you seen it?”
    “What?”
    “The mine.”
    “Once, when I was a kid out with my father.” She opened the passenger-side door and let Dog hop in. “We were fishing and I got bored, so I went for a walk over a few ridges.”
    She climbed in and stretched the safety belt over her chest. “Through the draws?”
    “Yep.” I glanced over my shoulder at the endless series of hills. “You get in some of these big draws and you can’t see the mountains; I was young, maybe six or seven, and not paying attention, and pretty soon I was lost. I got turned around and thought I was heading back, but then I saw an opening in a hillside with timbers and supports.” I climbed into the truck, set the board with the etched names, faded with time and weather, across the center console between us, and fastened my own seat belt. “I was a kid so of course I went over and looked into it, but it was dark.” I shook my head. “Threw a few pebbles in the opening but couldn’t hear anything. Anyway, I got bored again and kept walking.” I closed the door and started the Bullet. “Around dark, my father found me heading down Cook Road in the wrong direction. He was pretty mad, but I distracted him by telling him about the mine. We went back and looked for it a few days later; saw an old lineman’s shack, but I never could find the mine opening again.”
    She glanced through the windshield at the fork in the road. “So, where to?”
    I pointed my thumb at the arrow on the board that pointed to the left, next to the worn white letters in the reddish wood that read L ONE E LK . “The road less traveled, I suppose.”
    I pulled out and drove over a few more ridges and then hit a straightaway that seemed to stretch to the horizon.
    “But you saw it? I mean, it’s out here.”
    “The mine?” I thought about it, but the memories were vague. “Or maybe I just dreamed it.” I smiled at her. “I’m getting like that, you know. I think I know things from my past, but it turns out I just think that I know them; my youth is becoming a mythology to me.”
    She shook her head. “Just for the record? You say some of the strangest shit sometimes.”
    I went back to studying the road, because ahead is where the trouble usually is waiting. “Comes from having an overly active imagination.”
    Vic leaned forward in her seat. “Is that somebody?”
    “Yep, I think it is.” I began slowing the Bullet in an attempt to not powder whoever it might be—being