Charles Schaeffer's short mystery fiction has appeared in Futures Magazine, Woman's World, The Storyteller, Detective Mystery Stories, New England Writers Network, and online sites Mysterical-e and the Dana Literary Society's Journal. Mr. Schaeffer is a back to back winner of Alfred Hitchcock Magazine's "Mysterious Photo" Contest, and placed second in Futures Magazine's 2005 "Slesar Twist Contest."  Other writing has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, The Nation, the online magazine MindFire and the Pebble Lake Review.  Direct correspondence to Charles Schaeffer or Editor.

             Wish I could say otherwise, but our town has a history of violence and intrigue. I didn't know just how violent until the incident of the old canal barge. For years, the decaying tub had been an "attractive nuisance" to kids. When the canal closed for good years before, town fathers moored the barge in a makeshift slip carved out along the east bank of Crease's Creek.

             Trouble was, the location was made for kids with idle time to sneak aboard to explore the rotting ghost. Maybe it would have stayed harmless mischief, except one ghost came to life. Name was "Barney" Oldfield. Not the real race car hero, but sharing the same last name was enough to stick him with "Barney" for life. What else is new in Queenstown?

             Nobody recalls just when, but Barney, a homeless drifter, took up residence in the barge, his bearded disheveled appearance providing a scary lure for the kids. Barney's homesteading discouraged casual juvenile boarding parties. Still, it tweaked the devil in two older kids, Dwight Utterback and his brother, Melvin, who relished raining down pebbles on the barge from the bridge above. The clatter brought Barney storming out of the cabin, swearing and shaking a belaying pin at the brothers.

             One Sunday, shortly after dark in May, the Utterbacks stood bug-eyed in front of my desk at Precinct Headquarters. Their story tumbled out, with Melvin trying to top Dwight's histrionics. The gist was, the brothers had crept down one of the shaky wooden ladder to the barge intent on spooking Barney.

             There was a scare, though it wasn't Barney who was frightened, but his tormentors. Barney was dead, stretched out on the deck with his eyes wide open, staring, a belaying pin next to him, blood oozing from a head wound.

             "Did you see anyone else?" I asked.

             "Yes sir, Sergeant Stauffer," Wayne answered. "While we were staring at Barney, a man snuck behind us, then run up the ladder...."

             "But we didn't see his face," Melvin put in. "It was dark, except for the candle in the cabin."

             Turning to Sy Gaffney, one of Queenstown's four stalwarts in blue, I said: "Better have a look, Corporal. Take the big flashlight on the desk."

             "Anything you say, Jack."

             A few hours later, Gaffney returned with the presumed weapon and the news that Barney's body had been dispatched to the morgue. I sent the belaying pin to the police lab for a print check.

             Gaffney thought he had it figured. A couple of winos in their cups. A Fight. The perpetrator swings the wooden pin. Barney goes down for the count.

             The coroner passed over the whole thing as if someone had found a poisoned stray. No call for autopsy. Obvious blunt trauma. Routine inquest. Barney had been already disowned by his kin, who had occupied the same Grundy Street house for generations on the low-rent side of town. His aging mother
declared that Barney, with his drinking, had fulfilled everybody's prophecy of a bad end.

             I decided to take a gander at the barge. Robbery was out, because Barney's stash was mostly pennies, hoarded from street sales of the Queenstown Times at three cents a copy. The pennies bought liquid instead of solid nourishment, obvious by rows of empty RWL bottles.

           Fending off a medley of odors, I found the tin penny container was still there, untouched, in the cabin. But something else nagged — the incident at the train crossing a year before. The Queenstown Times had run off an "extra," bearing headline news too hot for normal circulation, something about Hitler annexing Czechoslovakia. It also meant a meager bonus for street smart sellers who hustled the most copies.

             Barney had snatched up his stack at the newsey's dock, and hightailed it to Calvert Street, the town's main drag, cut in the middle by a railroad crossing. Another of Queenstown's eccentric fixtures, street-newsy Gummy Wickard, a step behind, and sensing he was losing the race, reached out and pushed Barney just as the 4:08 Limited steamed toward the crossing. Somehow Barney dodged the moving train and leaped to safety.

             Nobody pressed charges and Gummy's capitalistic nudge slipped into the archives of town lore. Now, a year later, Barney's luck had changed at home on the barge. And for the second time Gummy Wickard's unsavory reputation rose to the top like a dead mackerel.

             At the station house, I kept my distance from the greasy jacket Corporal Gaffney held out like a dead skunk. "See the number, 27, on the orange badge?" Gaffney asked. "I found it on the barge."

             I focused on the badge pinned to the scrofulous garment.

             "Gummy Wickard's newsey's license," Gaffney explained. "Means he was there, right on the barge with Barney. Known enemies.

             We brought Gummy, enfurled in liquor aroma, in for questioning.

             "Yeah, sure, I was there, forgot my jacket," he owned up. "Me and Barney was old pals again."

             "What about your fingerprints found on the wooden pin?"

             Gummy wasn't sure what fingerprints were, so I explained.

             "Oh yeah, I remember that thing. Barney kept it around to shake at the kids. I picked it up and shook it as a joke."

             "The near-fatal push at the rail crossing?" I said. "You had it in for Barney."

             "Naw, that was just in fun," he insisted. "I woulda never have killed good ol' Barney. But you oughta talk to that historical feller."

             "Who?"

             "The one who goes all over town, savin' old buildings," he said through a toothless grin. "He had me chased outta more than one of 'em. After I left the barge that night, I got to the street corner. I turned around and seen him sneakin' down the ladder."

             "Maybe the guy the kids saw," Gaffney put in.

             I looked up the man described by Gummy. "Historical man" fit the description of the individual, who turned out to be, Grover Martin, head of the town's Historical Society. His presence on the barge the evening of Barney's death seemed logical enough. He had been there, he insisted, to give Barney fair warning that the canal and the barge were due to become official historical sites. Barney was strongly advised to find someplace else to live.

             Martin recalled being there about six in the evening, which was before the Utterback kids discovered the body. If true, they had spotted someone else later exiting the rotting relic in a hurry. The case was taking on complexity I hadn't counted on.

             Next day I double-checked the police report, scanning incidents for the previous month. An altercation on the tenth jumped out. A self-righteous citizen had taken justice into his own hands. The avenger, Howard Peebles, had been fined $25 for using a cane to attack Thousand-Drink Crandall, yet another vagrant from the town's roster of dispossessed. Scribbles in the report book simply ascribed "hates derelicts" as the reason.

             The quest for mindless retribution didn't rule out Peebles' marking Barney Oldfield for "derelict removal."

             Gaffney's inquiry yielded only a flimsy explanation of Peebles' whereabouts on the Sunday in question. By habit, the vigilante insisted, he was home listening to his favorite radio programs, Jack Benny and Fibber Mcgee and Molly, and could repeat exactly the plots. Maybe. He could have scrounged the stories somewhere else, but for now his halo fit.

             I could have dropped the case for lack of interest and there wouldn't have been a peep. If I nailed Wickard, justice could count on a wrist slap under some reduced mental capacity clause lurking in the system. Still, there was his unofficial public record of trying to send Barney out of town on the cowcatcher of the 4:08 Limited. He'd admitted being at the barge scene. Now the fingerprints. The judge heard out my probable cause argument and worked up charges.

             Next afternoon, I dropped off police paperwork at the Court House. Halfway down the marble steps, a familiar face caught my eye.  "Well, hello, there, Sergeant," a deep, baritone voice said. Its owner, Ogle Calvert, attorney to town swells, patrician antique collector, was decked out in spats and pearl gray gloves he wore year round.

             "Good afternoon, Mr. Calvert," I said, moving on by.

             "If you've got a minute," he said, pressing down his neatly-parted coal black hair.

             I shrugged a why-not and circled back to face him.

             "I won't hold you up," Calvert promised. "Just wanted to alert you to a development on the Wickard case. My firm will be taking it on pro bono. Of course, you realize it's not our sort of litigation, but we have to go the extra mile on occasion, don't we?

             "I'll ask for an O.R. release, which should work. Wickard's always shown up in court on a dozen past misdemeanor charges." He started to leave, then turned with an afterthought. "It's too bad we have to get caught up in these petty derelict squabbles. I suppose you'll want this cleared up and off the books quickly. You know how the council frets about the town budget."

             "I'll do what I gotta do," I said. Even occupying society's bottom rung, Barney, the victim, and Gummy Wickard, suspected bludgeoner, still had a frail hold on legal rights, I thought.

             Two days later I recalled that the canal and barge were on somebody's fast track to become a historical site. I knew the canal predated the turn of the century. But it's history was a mystery to me, just like the rest of my high-school history classes. What I did remember was that Cora Lynne Ashley, high school scholar, was now the town librarian. I had no logical reason to figure that the old days on the canal and barge had any bearing on Barney's demise. But it seemed like the only game in town.

             "Why Jack Stauffer, I haven't seen you since high school." Cora Lynne said, smiling from her desk. "You haven't changed. Still the same short black hair and brown eyes, maybe a little heavier. Can I help you find a book?"

             "No thanks." I related as much of the past days' events as I thought were needed to get her thinking.

             "Whooo. It all sounds spooky. Murder, right on that old barge," she said. I was thinking, even with horn rims and her raven hair in a bun, she was prettier than her class picture.

             "I hear it's headed for fame as an historical site," I said. "I got to wondering if that might have stirred up all the sudden activity — I mean after decades of nobody giving a hoot. And I heard you've got a canal exhibit here."

             Cora Lynne led me to a corner display on the second floor. Most visitors passed around it like an open drainpipe. But it was, Cora explained, accurate in its modest way. Forming the exhibit's backdrop, a gallery of pictures showed the barges, under mule power, entering the Queenstown lock. Another showed four railroad officials, including Maxwell Calvert, father of Ogle. A caption underneath explained how the men had arranged for using the barge's last trip to transport a railroad payroll. Another aging photo depicted members of the crew of the barge, the "Glory Bound." An archivist had printed in the names of the crew members, including one Otto Oldfield.

             "That name, Oldfield," I said to Cora Lynne, "he had to be kin of Barney."

             "Yes, his father. Otto Oldfield was a crew member until the day he was shot," she explained, opening a scrapbook with yellowing news clippings. The headline said: BARGE CAPTAIN AND CREW MEMBER DIE IN BARROOM SHOOTING.

            The news story was written in the stilted style of the era, but otherwise clear enough, providing a snapshot of canal culture and business. Barges transported bituminous coal from the Western counties east and south toward Atlantic ports. Travel through locks, more than 70 of them, was slow, well, as slow as two mules pulling the barges could make it. On the particular trip West, the Captain, Jeremiah Foster, and a crew member, Otto Oldfield, were honored to carry the competing railroad's payroll, destined for Queenstown, in gold coins. The arrangement was odd, but represented a gesture by rail tycoons, who had bought the struggling canal's holdings. Without public notice, the barge, Glory Bound, owned by Capt. Foster, was enlisted to transport the payroll, a journey of symbolic cooperation, but, in the end, disastrous.

             After arriving in Queenstown with Oldfield, Capt. Foster reported a harrowing tale of being set upon by brigands at lock 37, who shot the Lock House keeper and the third member of the Glory Bound's crew. A distraught Foster and Oldfield, survived the attack by unspecified wiles, and managed the rest of the arduous journey to Queenstown. The newspaper account of the crime relied on the testimony of bleary-eyed patrons of "Wild Sally's Jolly Ale House," where Foster and Oldfield had wandered to drown their woes. A fight broke out about midnight and when the smoke cleared, both lay dead, shot by each other.

             "No gold was ever found," Cora Lynne said, as she saw me frowning over the clipping.

             I figured as much. Nothing of value had been found on Foster, who had no heirs. But in Oldfield's pocket was a sheet of paper in an envelope. The police, the news article said, could make no sense of the verse or of a series of numbers, so they gave the envelope to Oldfield's widow, mother of young Barney and his sister. Cora Lynne paused, wrinkling her brow. "Oh, Barney himself was in here last month, asking for information about the canal's old lock system. Cora Lynne turned the pages of the scrap book and pointed out a second article, two months later, describing how railroad police later scoured the site of "The Great Barge Robbery." The article ended, quoting a skeptical railroad cop, who said his men found nothing indicating the barge had been attacked by robbers on horseback.

            By mid week I focused on the late Barney Oldfield and suspect Gummy Wickard, back home on the streets, thanks to the legal maneuvering by his unlikely benefactors, the Ogle Calvert law firm. I had an idea.

             Cora Lynne was at the main desk of the library working a crossword.  In library hush, I whispered: "Remember that old news clip, the one saying the railroad cops on that long-ago day expressed doubts about the barge being attacked by a band of robbers."

             She nodded. "It suggested that the rail cops thought maybe something else had happened."

             Moving outside with Cora Lynne to honor the "Quiet" sign, I said, "There was the paper and the envelope mentioned in the first article. I think it may mean something. You knew that Otto Oldfield was Barney's father. What about his mother?"

             "Surprising, but she's still alive, nearly ninety, living with a younger sister of Barney ... If one of them remembers what was on that paper," Cora said, "it might tell you something about the fatal day on the canal. You know, it seems like the dark ages, the 19th century, but it wasn't that long ago."

             I knocked on the door of Mrs. Oldfield's Grundy Street home. At first, no one answered and I knocked a second time. I heard slippered feet shuffling; the door opened, revealing a bent, gray-haired woman.

             I identified myself, and she motioned me inside without speaking. She nodded toward two worn living room chairs. She had already talked to Gaffney, and now, she grumbled about the visit from more police, and, earlier, some lawyer.

             "A lawyer?" I repeated.

            "From that fancy firm, what is it, Calvert? Said we might have an important paper, a piece of evidence, or something my husband had with him the day he was killed, something that might help find who killed Barney. You know my husband was a smart man. He read all the time, even poetry.

            "Anyway, I got all flustered in front of the lawyer, so I told him I wanted to get my daughter from her room. When we put Barney out six years ago, he took up on that rotten barge. Took the paper with him."

            "Have you any idea what it said?" I persisted.

            "There was a verse. But the whole thing never made any sense to me from the first day. When they were kids, Barney kept hold of it like some royal certificate. My daughter wrote the poem down, thinking it was something nice. She's got it somewheres."

            Hearing her mother call, Elvira, mid-sixtyish, entered the room, her face mirroring suspicion. "I always knew Barney would get us into trouble."

            "No trouble," I reassured her. "But could we see the poem?"

            A few minutes later, she returned with a copy. I unfolded it to a verse but no numbers. "You didn't keep a record of the numbers?" I copied the short poem into my notebook.

            She shook her head. "Barney took the original with him, numbers and all."

            "And, the lawyer, Calvert, what did he want?."

            "He only asked about the original. When Ma told him Barney took it to the barge, he just left in a hurry. Three days ago That's all I know."

             At the library, I laid out the copy with the verse in front of Cora Lynne. I invited her to use those high-school smarts to figure it out. Maybe like a crossword. Later, I took another look around the barge. Could Barney's old paper still be there, hidden? I waited until dusk, and with the office flashlight, lowered myself down the rickety ladder. There was a second thing I wanted to check and it panned out. Over the decaying wood desk in the cabin, carved weathered letters, barely readable, confirmed the name, Glory Bound, the payroll barge. But if the paper had been aboard the old tub, it was nowhere to be seen.

            I left the cabin, picking my way across through the litter, when a loud pop rang out from the opposite shore. A splash kicked up a geyser several feet from the gunwale. I hit the oak deck, sprawling as a second shot whistled into the water, this time skipping and lodging in the rotting side.It was dark now, but I crouched there for minutes, my heart pounding. My knee was bleeding through a hole ripped in my trousers by my dive to the desk. Minutes more passed before I carefully pried the bullet from the water-logged pine of the barge, then escaped up the shaky ladder.

            At Headquarters, Corporal Gaffney was not sympathetic. "Trying to get yourself killed over a couple of winos," he said. "Not smart. You didn't see it probably, but an editorial in yesterday's Queenstown's rag, wondered why the police department was wasting taxpayers's money on a fight between two skid-row bums."

            About noon a reporter from the paper ambled in, sniffing for something different than the town's usual collection of wife beatings. "This all you got?" he called, glancing up from the arrest book.

            "Tell me about it," I shot back. "Seems like you guys with your editorials would be happy if we spared the taxpayers by just putting our flat feet on the desk."

            "Not me, Sarge. "News is separate from the Edit Page. I don't call editorial shots. Takes somebody like a shareholder, a bigwig like Ogle Calvert to twist the editor's arm."

            So maybe Calvert had developed sympathy for the taxpayers, but I guessed from his standpoint that the quicker the case ended, the less time he would have to put into Gummy Wickard's defense.

            "Mr. Calvert was at the paper, then?"

            "Yeah, the other day," the reporter answered. "And also about a month ago after our short piece on the canal going historic. I heard him reaming out our news morgue clerk for taking so long to find old files on some long-ago shooting on the canal and some envelope that went to the victim's family."

            The phone rang. Cora Lynne was excited. "Can you come over to the library now?" I agreed and dropped the bullet, a funny-looking thing, off with Gaffney to check out.

            Cora Lynne and I settled in next to the library's canal exhibit upstairs. She read aloud the verse I'd given her earlier, enunciating each syllable.

            "The sunshine of thine eyes,
            (O still celestial beam!)
            Whatever it touches it fills
            With the life of its lambent beam.
            The sunshine of thine eyes,
            Oh, let it fall on me!
            Though I be but mote of the air,
            I could turn to gold for thee."

I shrugged.

            "It's a verse by a 19th century poet named, George Parsons Lathrop," she explained."Otto Oldfield must have known it by heart. It must have accompanied the missing paper with the numbers you mentioned."

            I didn't figure it for the longest time — then it dawned. 'The 'mote' stands for the canal, even though it's not spelled like moat," I said. "And 'turn to gold for thee' has to be a reference to the stolen payroll. But the numbers are — missing."

            "You need the paper," she said. "But I have another idea. The poem mentions 'celestial beam.'  And what do boats have lots of — ?"

            "Beams, for sure. And a celestial one would be overhead, probably in the cabin. But then what?"

            "I think," Cora Lynne said, "that's where the numbers are, either the envelope or in some other form."

            A third trip to the barge, this time in full daylight, had me scanning all the overhead beams of the creaking 90 foot boat. No envelope or anything else jumped out and I was ready to give up when I stumbled into the compartment where food was stored for the mules in the old days. There were beams on the overhead hatch, and by squinting and tracing with my finger, bingo, I discovered a series of numbers almost out of sight on the interior side of one of the beams. I copied them in my note book: "90 37 94 42," and an inch above the series, "300E," and "2,640."

            Cora Lynne had researched the canal. When I got back to her with my find, her brain raced in high gear. Her explanation, which now seemed as obvious as flies on the lemon pie at the Queenstown's Coney Island Diner, was this: In its heyday, the canal had about 70 locks, spaced over its 180 or so miles. The same numbers must be on Otto Oldfield's paper, and the lower ones represent lock numbers, while the higher ones stand for "mile markers." The number 2,640 marked a point halfway between posts located a mile apart

            "As for the 300E, I can't be sure," Cora Lynne said, disappointed, "but it could stand for feet or yards, maybe paces, headed 'E' for eastward."

            Of course, there were no robbers--not on horseback, anyway. Conniving Captain Foster and cunning crew member, Otto Oldfield, had faked the robbery, killing the lock tender at Lock 37, and one of their own crew as a cover story. Later, their tale, bandied around Wild Sally's bar, then to the cops, became the official one. And after the shootout, well, dead bargemen tell no tales.

            "One of the two, probably Otto, carved the crude code into wood in case the envelope got lost. And then we come to the point: halfway between those mile markers — 2,640 feet — and Locks 37 and 42 is a cache of gold coins big in face value and worth a fortune to collectors."

            "Don't forget the 300E," she reminded.

            "I'm betting paces to the east."

            Corporal Gaffney came back with a report on the bullet, a missile fired from a Civil War rifle. The shooter was a either a notoriously bad marksman, or the shots were only meant to scare me. It didn't matter. I decided to put the historical man, Grover Martin, no longer a suspect, to work, and assigned him an officer with instructions to round up certain Civil War artifacts.

            I sought out suspect, Gummy Wickard, of no fixed abode.When I couldn't find him, I called the office of Ogle Calvert. His secretary said Calvert had left town, minutes before, by car , not saying where he was going, but promising to phone in later. Did she know where Wickard was? Yes, because homeowners had called to complain about his shelter, a cardboard shack on an empty lot on Schyle Street.

            Gaffney was skeptical, complaining that Ogle Calvert drove a fast LaSalle, and that the Queenstown fleet of squad cars consisted of one 1936 Chevy, no match in a chase. The state map on the wall was my rebuttal. The main two-lane asphalt highways, Route 118, where Calvert would be driving, shadowed the river and the canal for 50 miles south. We could follow 118 for 30 miles, then at the crossroads of Rt. 73, a one-lane connector road cuts east. Taking it would shave 30 minutes from the trip to Sharpsburg, the town nearest Lock 37, scene of the staged robbery.

            At first Gummy Wickard would have none of it. But I waved a bottle of RWL under his nose--not in the book of police procedure. We reached cutoff route 73 with Gummy sucking on the RWL, and turned eastward before I began questioning the defendant in the back seat while the squad car radio crackled.

            His account of the story, luckily, coincided with my own suspicions. Gummy figured he was obliged to tell his lawyer everything, and he had, confirming the fact that the late Barney Oldfield had bragged to him of owning a mysterious key to great wealth. In one alcoholic haze session, his story went, Gummy had dared Barney to put up or shut up. And that's when a woozy Barney revealed not only the carving on the beam, but also the hiding place of paper bearing the numbers, which he was determined to cash in on before the canal became a historical site.

             Ahead on the road, a sign said "Sharpsburg 2 miles." I figured we had about a scant 25 minutes to liberate a canoe, and paddle the half mile to lock 37. The stealth voyage was working, as we slid in behind the Lockhouse, moored the canoe out of sight, and clambered up the bank. The next phase took us along the towpath to a point between the mile markers Cora Lynne and I had identified as the likely spot where Capt. Foster and Otto Oldfield had, no doubt, worked their way 300 paces East through dense undergrowth to bury the booty.

            Behind, the splash of an oar broke the calm. Calvert's strategy had paralleled our own. In seconds, I steered Gummy Wickard into the bushes, a few feet off the towpath, and whispered specific instructions, ones that might save his hide from jail. Gaffney and I ducked behind two large oaks, just as Ogle Calvert ll, outfitted in spiffy hiker's gear, complete with latrine shovel loomed into view, wearing workman gloves rather than his pearl gray dandies. He took the paper from his jacket pocket, studied the mile marker and terrain and began pacing off.

            Suddenly, Gummy Wickard leaped from the bushes, and cried out: "Half of the treasure, Mr. Calvert! Or I squeal."

            Ogle Calvert's eyes widened, as he stepped back startled. Then his face tightened. He had come too far to give up major riches for this minor inconvenience. "I don't know how you got here," Calvert snarled, "but I know how you're going out." He grabbed the shovel from his backpack and raised it over Wickard.

            "Hold it right there," I called out, pointing my revolver.

            Calvert dropped the shovel. "What kind of a frameup is this. I'll have you all fired."

            "Not unless you beat the rap for attempted aggravated assault — and can I guess — murder of Barney Oldfield, when he caught you snooping around for his code last May.Then taking a powder up the ladder. The Utterback kids caught a glimpse. But not good enough to identify you. "Frustrated, you switched to finagling exact whereabouts of the coded paper out of Gummy Wickard, the client you didn't take on free as a noble gesture, but as a patsy for information. You did did hit lucky — Gummy's fingerprints on the weapon and not yours, because you had on your natty gray gloves that Sunday."

            "How could I have even known about a coded paper — as you call it?"

            "Oh, you knew about it all right. After the article in the Queenstown paper saying the Canal was going historic, you figured, just as Barney did, that time was running out, and Park Rangers would soon be in charge of the canal. You checked out the paper's old files, showing the paper was in Barney's family. You even browbeat the clerk. And, of course, there'll be Gummy Wickard's testimony that you wangled the hiding spot out of him, including the carving in the beam.

            The idea of a hidden shipment of gold wasn't new to you, either. The photo in the library shows your father was one of the officials who managed the transportation. It's easy to guess you knew the family story, if not all the details.You went to the barge that evening with the sole purpose of getting that envelope. Barney resisted. You killed him — probably in anger and frustration. But you had to run when the Utterbacks showed up unexpected. Here today, you had a big stake — too big to let derelict like Gummy Wickard stand in your way."

            "You can't hold me on speculation for taking a defensive move against someone jumping from the bushes and threatening me."

            I slipped cuffs on the lawyer and relieved him of Barney's paper with scribbled notes on where to dig. "I suppose you'll be able to tell a jury where you got this. What a different story, eh, if you'd quietly pinched the code, as planned, without having to kill Barney when he found you prowling on the barge -- oh, and Corporal Gaffney has some news."

            "Well," Gaffney explained, " Grover Martin, the town historian, had a record of five owners of civil war stuff, including guns. I had a station house guy with a warrant check out all five — just to be fair. On the way here, we got a radio report that the one you own had been recently fired. And the mini ball pried from the barge matches your collection. The other four rifles used metal cartridges developed later in the war."

            "We'll see how that goes," Calvert snapped, still defiant.

            My thought turned to phantom treasure that had brought us all this way. If we should uncover it, it would go back to the railroad. I traded digging duty with Gaffney. A short time later, the shovel struck an object. And we hoisted the heavy payroll case from the earth.

            Prying off the rusted lock with Calvert's shovel was easy. I opened the lid not on gleaming gold, but on colorful batches of Confederate bills. Bricks at the bottom accounted for the weight. I watched Ogle Calvert ll turn as pale as his afternoon tea cream.

            Of course, I didn't know the why of the switch. But I shared a guess with my captive audience. Not really trusting the barge crew to begin with, rail executives substituted the worthless bills, sending the real payroll by train, figuring nobody else would ever know the truth. I considered one more possibility. Though there was no record of it happening, I wouldn't be surprised if some real thieves — robber barons of the last century — hadn't picked up a little bonus of their own — the insurance cash from the missing payroll. Which, of course, wasn't missing at all, except in the columns of the gullible Queenstown Times.

            Maybe Cora Lynne and I could dig into that together.

             Copyright 2005 by Charles Schaeffer