“Ed and I . . .” He cleared his throat. “Ed and I went out on one of our expeditions, as we liked to call them. With our metal detectors. Carla, Ed’s girlfriend, had come with us on our expeditions a few times. She enjoyed them, and so she came along with us that night, too. The three of us went out to eat. Then, after dark, we drove to a piece of land east of Washington. It was a crisp, clear, beautiful night.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. “We’d done a great deal of reading over the years about the Confederate gold. We’d learned from the experiences of other treasure hunters and formulated our own theories about where portions of the gold might have ended up. We had good reason to think that if someone had buried the gold, they’d buried some of it in that general region. We’d gone over other sections of that piece of land with metal detectors in the past.” His words ended in prolonged silence.

“And you returned that night to check a section you hadn’t before,” Luke supplied.

“Yes. The gold had been lost a hundred and fifty years before. We’d been searching for it for most of our lives without success. It was mostly the thought, you see, of discovering something so elusive that we liked. It kept us going.”

As if his knees had gone too weak to support him, Robbie lowered onto a wingback chair. “That night, we walked back and forth with our detectors for an hour or so. Then we took a break. We sat around a camping lantern, eating the brownies Carla made.”

“And?”

“Then we resumed the search. Fifteen minutes or so later, Ed’s metal detector started going off. I brought mine over. Carla came with the shovel. It wasn’t unusual for us to find things. Tin cans. Belt buckles. Knives. Coins. We started digging.”

“And ended up finding the missing Confederate gold.”

Robbie gave Luke a look that asked for understanding. “To our astonishment, we did. Our mother had raised us on legends of that gold, so it was like coming face-to-face with Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Surreal. Euphoric.”

“The land where you were digging did not belong to you.”

“No.”

“The ethical thing would have been to call the police and notify the landowner.”

“It’s very unlikely the landowner would have been able to profit off the find. Have you heard of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act?”

Luke shook his head.

“It passed in 1979. Anything deemed an archeological resource, and the Confederate gold certainly qualifies, belongs to the government.”

“Then why didn’t you turn it over to the government?”

“That question is harder to answer.”

“Answer it.”

“The gold was the most precious thing any of us had seen in our lifetimes. And Ed and I had found it. We’d found . . . a miracle, through our own efforts.”