“I promise you I won’t laugh,” Dormer said, his tone dead serious.

“Be sure to dip your Monte Cristo in the grape jam, Mr. Dormer. It heightens the pleasure. Now then, as I’ve mentioned, my uncle was a man of great detail, a keen observer of his work, his surroundings and accomplishments. I’ve collected most of his diaries and notebooks; they fill a goodly portion of my study’s bookshelves. His remarks concerning the Sour Rock and the Buffalo mines, for example, take up five hundred and twenty-seven pages of exacting sketches and neatly legible handwriting. The pages in the notebook that come under the heading of the `Little Angel Mine,’ however, are totally blank.”

“He left nothing behind regarding the Little Angel, not even a letter, perhaps?”

Young shrugged and shook his head. “It was as though there was nothing to record. It was as though Joshua Hays Brewster and his eight-man crew went down into the bowels of the earth never intending to return.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Ridiculous as it seems,” Young admitted, “the thought of mass suicide once darted through my mind. Extensive research showed me that all nine men were either bachelors or widowers. Most were itinerant loners who drifted from digging to digging, looking for any excuse to move on when they became bored or disenchanted with the foreman or mine management. They had little to live for once they became too old to work the mines.”

“But Jason Hobart had a wife,” Donner said.

“What? What’s that?” Young’s eyes widened. “I found no record of a wife for any of them.”

“Take my word for it.”

“God in heaven! If my uncle had known that, he’d never have recruited Hobart.”

“Why is that?”

“Don’t you see he needed men he could trust implicitly, men who had no close friends or relatives to ask questions should they vanish.”

“You’re not making sense,” Donner said flatly.

“Simply put, the reopening of the Little Angel Mine and the subsequent tragedy was a sham, a pretext, a hoax. I’m convinced my uncle was going mad. How or what caused his mental illness will never be known. His character altered drastically, even to the point of producing a different man.”

“A split personality?”

“Exactly. His moral values changed; his warmth and love for friends disappeared. When I was younger, I talked to people who remembered him. They all agreed on ore thing the Joshua Hays Brewster they all knew and loved died months before the Little Angel disaster.”

“How does this lead to a hoax?”

“Insanity aside, my uncle was still a mining engineer. Sometimes he could tell within minutes whether a mine would pay or not. The Little Angel was a bust, he knew that. He never had any intention of finding a high-grade lode. I don’t have the vaguest idea of what his game was, Mr. Dormer, but one thing I’m certain of, whoever pumps the water from the lower levels of that old shaft will find no bones.”