“One of the passengers was the dour-faced Mrs. Minnie Margaret Franklin on her way to San Francisco, where she was meeting her banker husband. In her trunk, she’d packed the gift her father had given to her upon her eighteenth birthday. An emerald-and-sapphire necklace rumored to have belonged to the royal family of Spain. Upon her rescue a few hours later, Minnie Franklin sent a telegraph to her husband saying he had two months to return to Boston or their marriage was over.”

“And did he?” Maggie asked.

“He most certainly did. He may have been a banker, but her family was the one who owned the bank.”

“Where did the coach end up?” Silas asked, his memory a little foggy on the details.

“The stage was found days later, abandoned outside a silver mine another two hours south. Nothing but scrub brush and canyons for miles in any direction.”

“Were the outlaws caught?” Maggie asked.

“Not for that. Reports say they buried the gold and split up, making a pact to come back a year later to recover it,” Wallace said, sliding the quarters off in different directions. “Black Jack took a slug to the back of the head after a poker game in Montana. Potter took ill and died on a ranch up north. Espinosa went to prison for a bank robbery in Texas. The law tried to coax the location out of him, but he never cracked. Died from typhoid in prison when he was forty-two. No deathbed confession, much to the disappointment of treasure hunters.”

The dog proudly trotted into the room, kittens—dubbed Dolly Parton and Taco by popular vote—on his heels.

“That ain’t natural,” Wallace observed. Kevin licked his pants and continued his tour of the house with the cats.

“Love is love,” Maggie told him.

Wallace harrumphed. “I found this at the library last night before it closed,” he said, producing one of several sheets of paper from a zippered folio embossed with the Kinship Historical Society logo.

Silas peered over Maggie’s shoulder at the photocopy. It was a page from a book with an illustration of a gold coin. “The coins that stage was carrying were freshly minted in a gold camp in Montana,” Wallace lectured. “Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Montana was in the midst of a gold rush. Mints that turned raw gold into currency were popping up like them there coffee shops today that set up on the same block. They weren’t very regulated, and mistakes were made.”

“What kind of mistakes?” Maggie asked.

“Well, rumor has it that the stage that was robbed was carrying a strongbox full of fresh coins made with a dollar dye on one side and a quarter dye on the other,” Wallace said.

“An entire strongbox of gold mistakes,” Silas mused. He’d never heard that particular bit of gossip. “Where did you hear that?”