Chapter 2

By the time we stopped for the night, it was too late to cook dinner, so we went out to eat. Before we left, I covered the mirror with a sheet of plywood and turned it to face the wall, securing it with canvas straps attached to the wall studs. I didn’t want anyone or anything coming through from the other side.

Surprisingly, Amy let Vickie join us in the bedroom again tonight. I still hadn’t figured out what was up, but like any horny, red-blooded male, I wasn’t going to question it. My lack of questioning paid dividends tonight

While the two women started panning along the river the next morning, I went shopping. I bought a small furnace designed for smelting gold. I also bought flux, tongs, and special gloves, as well as all the other necessary tools. Finally, I bought a dozen ceramic composite crucibles, and two old-fashioned cast iron muffin pans. Once I had everything set up, I put the gold they had collected so far into a crucible along with some flux, and heated the crucible. After everything melted, I carefully removed the slag, putting it into an empty crucible, and poured the remaining gold into one of the cast iron muffin pans to form two, flat-topped muffin-sized ingots.

While I was finishing that job, Vickie let loose with a whoop of excitement. I’d set up my smelter on the other side of the shop so they could talk without me overhearing. Vickie had been running the metal detector along the riverbank looking for accumulations of alluvial nuggets behind large boulders when the metal detector screamed shrilly and continuously.

They dug down and started panning the sand and gravel from a large deposit of nuggets. Each pan they worked yielded three or four ounces of nuggets. They got a lot of gold dust, too, but lost more than they saved due to inexperience and/or impatience to retrieve the big nuggets. After finishing several pans, they came upon a softball-sized rock. When they tried to move it, the rock wouldn’t budge. They finally dug out around it with a garden trowel and found that the entire rock was a chunk of gold. Hence Vickie’s whoop of excitement.

Amy stepped through the mirror and, standing in frigid ankle-deep water, wrestled the nugget out of the two-foot-deep hole and up to ground level. “This thing weighs a ton,” she gasped. After resting for a few seconds, she lifted the nugget again, standing up so that she was through the mirror. Before carefully stepping several inches beyond the edge of the mirror, she handed me the nugget that I estimated weighed about twenty-five pounds.

I watched for a few more minutes as they located four more large concentrations of nuggets with the metal detector and marked them with little orange landscaping flags. While Vickie started panning the first deposit, Amy hurried into the house and returned with a box of zippered sandwich bags that they filled with what they found.

After rinsing and drying the huge nugget, I grabbed a wide masonry chisel, a five-pound sledgehammer, and a medium-sized anvil. Regretfully, I used them to cut the nugget into smaller pieces, knowing that a nugget of that size would easily be identified by any serious gold enthusiast. Soon I had small pieces that I could smelt. It took nearly half an hour before the chunks were small enough to put into crucibles. Once again, I fired up the smelting furnace. It held up to nine crucibles, so I filled the crucibles with the chunks and filled in the gaps with the smaller nuggets and flakes they had panned so far.

We had wine with dinner. We always let Vickie drink beer or wine for dinner with us provided she promised not to leave the house for the rest of the night. Tonight, they both drank a bit more than usual and were both quite relaxed when we headed for bed. The ladies showered before dinner and wore flimsy negligees that did nothing to hide their feminine charms.

After an energetic quickie with each woman in the shower Thursday morning, we were on the road to Atlanta to sell the gold. I called ahead to make sure they had someone available to perform an assay and had armed security available to meet us after 9 am. We pulled into the parking structure shortly before 9:15. After a cautious drive through all four levels of the parking structure, I called the buyer and told him we had arrived. Amy took over driving and dropped me off at the fourth-floor freight elevator. Five minutes later, five armed men wearing security badges with their pictures exited the elevator.

After checking each guard’s ID, I called the girls, and they drove up. I unloaded five canvas grocery bags onto the cart the security guards had with them. While I stayed with the gold, Amy parked the truck in the nearby space they had reserved for us, and we all rode up to the eighth floor of the office building.

Once we were inside their offices, one of the head honchos looked at me for an explanation. I opened one of the bags and held it open for him to look into. “Holy shit!” he gasped, looking back at me, his eyes as wide as saucers.

“There should be right around fifty to sixty pounds of gold in the ingots,” I told him. Holding open another bag I explained, “This bag is what I skimmed off the top when I smelted it. I also brought the flux I used ‘cuz I figure you’re going to have a crapload of questions,” I told him, motioning to the sandwich bag with flux in it. I handed him a copy of the flux label and the receipt from the store where I bought the flux.

They weighed everything: fifty-seven pounds and 3.522 Troy ounces of gold in four small muffins. They had a good laugh at my muffin ingots but admitted that they were ingenious. By the time they had assayed each of the muffins, it was early afternoon. The flux I used and the impurities that were left after smelting proved that I had smelted nuggets, and not melted down stolen jewelry.

It took another half hour for them to wire transfer just north of two-and-a-half million dollars to our bank account. They were impressed with what we brought in, and excited when I told them we would eventually bring in another batch. Dan, the owner, gave me his direct number to call next time, and suggested that I not smelt future batches of nuggets and gold dust so we could avoid suspicion that I was smelting stolen jewelry. All I had to tell him was who I was, the date and time I’d be there, and the number of guards I wanted. When I asked about selling old coins, he gave me the number of a friend of his who specialized in old coins, especially gold coins.

Naturally, the women wanted to shop. We rented an SUV for them to fill and got a suite at a five-star hotel. After agreeing to meet for dinner, the girls drove the SUV and I took my pickup truck and laptop and paid a visit to my alma mater (for two whole semesters), Georgia State. Ensconced in the library, I began researching the Spanish treasure fleets and Manila galleons. While the ladies shopped for two days, I researched, making copies of hundreds of lists of ships known to have sunk, as well as where if the location was known. I copied maps of routes the galleon fleets followed, including cities they frequented, like Havana, Portobelo, Veracruz, Acapulco, Panama City, and Cartagena. I made copious notes about the pirates who operated in both the Caribbean and, later, on the Pacific side of the Americas. I went online and ordered thirty-seven books with more detailed information, paying extra to have them delivered to my home within two days.