The GiftedChapter 17 Running
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LenaChapter 15 free porn video
Jay’s turn:
Dirt’s not supposed to go ‘clunk’.
“What’s that?” Lena asked.
“I dunno. Can you pick the bucket up just a little bit and sort of scrape?”
“I’ll try.”
She’ll try. I’m thinking I’ve seen guys getting heavy equipment operator pay who weren’t as adept as Lena has become. She played the controls, the bucket curled out, down, then drew back, peeling an inch off the surface.
“Nope,” I said. “Another one.”
This time as the clay-laden soil pulled back, it revealed the deep reddish brown of rusted iron.
“That’s something,” I said. “Lemme get the shovel.”
I jumped off, grabbed the shovel, scraped more dirt off the top of what appeared to be an iron box, maybe a foot and a half wide and two and a half feet long. Raised bands reinforced and demarcated the edges. I tapped the center. Although rusty and buried for who knows how long, there was still enough integrity for it to resist my prodding.
“Okay, let’s see if we can dig it up, cutie,” I said. “Start out around here,” I told her as I marked a perimeter for the new excavation with the point of my spade.
Twenty minutes later we were looking at a box, like a rusty pedestal in the middle of the conical excavation.
“Looks like something from a museum. Or one of those old westerns, you know. Strong box,” Lena observed.
I shoved on it. “Heavy,” I said. “Can you get under it with the front end loader?”
“I can do that. Stand back.” She pulled up her outriggers and curled the backhoe bucket up, then turned her seat around and made a little loop, approaching the hole with her front-end loader bucket. It took her a few moves to clear a bucket-width space, then it was a simple matter of scooping under the box.
She had it up and out. I positioned a couple of small timbers and pointed. She flipped the box out onto them, then with her bucket, pulled it back upright. She got off the tractor and came to stand beside me.
I nudged it. “Heavy,” I said.
“What’s in it?” she asked, voicing the same question I had.
“Dunno,” I replied. I took the tip of the shovel and peeled more clay and rust off it. Big lump on the side. I worked that. “Used to be a lock.”
“People lock things worth protecting,” she said as it chipped away under my efforts.
The lock was mostly exposed and very much rusted. My tool box gave up a hefty hammer. “Stand back,” I said. I gave the lock an enthusiastic whack. The shackle popped. I removed it, hooked my fingers under the edge of the lid. Lifted.
You didn’t think it’d be that easy, did you? I rapped all the way around the periphery of the lid with the hammer, then added a prybar to my efforts. The hinges on the lid got extra whacking. The prybar got tapped into what was left of the gap between the lid and the body of the box.
Lift. Nothing. Lift HARD. Nothing. One more try. Did I feel movement? I repositioned for a fresh purchase. Pulled. We were rewarded by a half-inch of movement. I shoved it back down.
“Why’d you do that?” Lena questioned.
“Working the hinges,” I said. I whacked them with the hammer again, then went back to the prybar. Next try got us an inch. I could get fingers into the gap. I lifted. Nothing. Another round with the hinges, then this time I got the lid to forty-five degrees. One more time, and we had it open. I could see the contents – rotted tops of what had to be leathern bags, packed solidly inside the box.
I grabbed the string-tied top of one bag, tugged. The leather gave way, leaving me holding the scrap. And an unmistakable metallic glint.
“Baby, let’s go lock the gate.”
“Is that what I think it is?”
I picked up a gold coin. Unmistakable. Dated 1851. Twenty-dollar. “Yes, it is. Let’s lock the gate.”
We blatted down the lane on the tractor. I hopped off, locked the chain that held the gate closed. I was shaking.
“Back up. Let’s see what we found.”
Twenty-four bags. Twenty-two bags each had two thousand dollars in gold coins – double eagles, eagles, half-eagles. Two bags were filled with silver dollars. As we unloaded bags, we scanned dates. Nothing newer than 1861. Hundreds of coins, most of it gold, and at bullion value alone, we were looking at, well, each twenty-dollar coin was essentially an ounce of gold and last time I looked, gold was twelve hundred dollars an ounce. We had forty-four thousand dollars in face value in gold. Call it over two thousand ounces of bullion. That’s a couple of million dollars. And it’s NOT bullion. Those are gold coins and in collector value, some of them are, to my unschooled eye, prime condition, likely to fetch twice the bullion value, and if there are any especially rare or pristine examples, the value goes waaay up.
“Well isn’t THIS something?” Lena said.
“I’m almost speechless,” I answered. “We just dug up a couple of million dollars.”
“We need to move this inside,” I said.
“The bags are trashed,” she observed. “I’ll drive into town and get some containers.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. “You stay right here and watch this stuff.”
She wouldn’t even let me ride down the lane to get the gate for her.
While she was gone, I started sorting by dates and mint marks. When she got back, the two of us would make short work of cataloging the find.
I’m sitting here on top of a hill in central Louisiana looking at maybe three or four million dollars. Surreal. Phone rings, lilting little tune that means Lena.
“Hey, baby, I’m coming up the road. Unlock the gate.”
“Sure will, sweetness,” I said.
I mounted the tractor, drove it down the lane, opened the gate, then closed it behind her, following her back up the hill.
“I bought every pint container they had,” she said as I unloaded bags from the truck.
She eyed the piles of coins I had made on a timber.
“Grouped by year and mint mark,” I said.
“Mint mark?”
“Yeah. American coins have a mark, usually a letter, sometimes two, showing which mint they were made in.”
“And that makes a difference?”
“It can make a HUGE difference. Baby, this is gold. If it was melted down, gold’s around twelve hundred dollars an ounce, so that’s a base value for this. That coin you’re holding is a double eagle – twenty dollars face value. The US Mint made those things out of an ounce of ninety percent gold. But a lot of ‘em I looked at are in great shape and they’ll easily double the value as collectibles. A few of ‘em will be worth way more.”
“You know how to do this?” she asked.
“Oh, hell no,” I said. “I know a guy I can call, though. There are people who do this kind of stuff for a living. Besides, there are legal things. We just found a treasure...”
“On OUR land, baby...” she held.
“Yes, we do have that, clear title, all the way back to – I dunno, I’d have to look at the abstract of title. But yes, our land.”
“Where’d this come from?”
“Well,” I said, “ the newest coins are dated 1861 from the New Orleans mint. I’m thinking Civil War. This whole area was part of the Red River Campaign. The Union army was all through here. Big battle near Mansfield. I’m thinking that banks were trying to get money out of the way of the Yankees. They buried it under the floor here, put the old boards back over the hole, a little hay, a little horse manure...”
“And they didn’t come back for it?”
“Might’ve gotten killed in a skirmish. I dunno. History. A hundred and fifty years of history. A lot of details get lost.”
“We could be rich...” she said, wide-eyed.
“Baby,” I said, “I’m already rich. Got my Lena...”
“We have plenty money in savings and investments, Jay.” She was right. The two of us working, All of her salary and a big chunk of mine went into some funds that have been paying us very well. Tossing a couple of million dollars on the pile, well, it wouldn’t make us independently wealthy, but we could be very picky about where we worked and when...
“This house we wanna build...”
“Yeah, we could build a really nice house.”
“I don’t need a two million dollar house, baby. But we won’t sweat it.”
“Weren’t gonna sweat it anyway,” I said. “Get your laptop. I’ll put these things in the containers and you can catalog ‘em as we go.”
“Mark each container,” she said. “We can put that on the inventory. I’ll build a spreadsheet.”
We had everything packed up and stowed in a corner of the trailer in time for dinner. Afterward, I’m sitting there fingering that 1861 double eagle from the New Orleans mint. That’s the last US coins that mint made before the Civil War and this one is immaculate and a quick Internet search says I’m holding almost ninety thousand dollars in my hand.
“You’re kidding.”
“There it is, honey-bunny,” I told her. “I didn’t have any idea. We seriously need to get somebody who KNOWS this stuff. We don’t know what we’ve got. There’s NOTHING we’ll sell at bullion prices.”
“When can you call your friend?”
“I guess it’s not too late tonight.” I scrolled through my contacts on my phone, then punched it with a fingertip.
“Jay Harris!” the voice on the other end answered. He sounded happy to see me on the caller ID.
“Hey yourself, Mike Jansen. Where’re you at these days?” I asked.
“Building a new midstream facility in South Dakota,” he said. “This place is nuts.”
“That’s what I heard. I just finished a project in Missouri. I’m married now, and me ‘n’ the wife are clearing a home site in central Louisiana. I got a question.”
“Shoot,” he said.
“You still into coins?”
“Both ways, buddy. Collecting. Bullion. Why?”
“If a guy was to need professional help for disposing of a sizable collection, do you know a good guy?”
“I know a bunch of dealers that’ll treat you right.”
“BIG collection. Several hundred antebellum coins.”
“Uh, I know the guy to talk to. He’s up on the tax laws and all that, assuming you want to be legal.”
Grace
- 25.06.2020
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