Angela didn’t have to be prodded. “Jefferson is writing to his friend Dr. Benjamin Barton about the loss of his Indian vocabularies. Barton was a naturalist, and a member of the Philosophical Society. Jefferson calls the theft an ‘irreparable misfortune.’ Over thirty years, he had collected fifty Indian vocabularies, but had put off printing them because he hadn’t digested the stuff Lewis had collected. He thought some of the Indian words were common to Russian. He retrieved a few pages from the river, including some Pani Indian words Lewis collected, ‘and a little fragment of some other,’ which I see is in his handwriting, but no indication remains of what language it is.”

“I wonder if those fragments are similar to the words identified on the map as Phoenician,” Gamay said.

“Possible,” Paul said. “Maybe Jefferson wrote to Lewis and told him about the Phoenician words on the map. Lewis recognized the words as being similar to some other stuff he had collected in his travels but not given to Jefferson.”

“Why would he hold the material back?” Gamay said.

“He didn’t recognize their significance. After he got the missive from his old boss, he dropped everything and headed for Monticello with something he wanted to show Jefferson.”

“That means the map is quite significant,” Gamay said. “It makes the Phoenician connection, and shows the location of Ophir.”

“Tantalizing, but useless without more information,” Trout said with a shake of his head. “A compass rose. Measure of distance. Landmarks. Data like that would help.”

Angela opened her briefcase, rummaged through the Jefferson file, and pulled out the page with the squiggles, dots, and Phoenician words.

She waved the paper in the air. “We all agree that some of the details of the map are cut off,” she said.

“That’s right,” Paul said. “It appears to be part of a larger diagram.”

“If that’s true,” Gamay said with growing excitement, “it’s possible that what Lewis was carrying to Jefferson was the other half of the map. Lewis supposedly found a gold mine on his Pacific expedition.”

“Wow!” Angela said. “That means if our theory about the young slave holds true, Jefferson knew where the Ophir mine was.”

“Hold on a second,” Paul said with a grin. “We may have given you the wrong impression. Gamay and I tend to toss ideas around, but we can’t forget we’re scientists. That means we operate on the basis of fact. We’re making guesses based on assumptions that haven’t been proven.”

Angela looked crestfallen. Gamay tried to cheer the young researcher. “You’ll have to admit it’s an exciting suggestion, Paul, even with all the questions.”

“I’d be the first to agree that it is plausible,” Paul said. “Maybe we’ll start to find the answers here.”