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inside.
    He handed her some beef jerky and hard biscuits, and Shannon got very busy eating her supper.

    “Okay, time’s up. What are you doing here?” Gabe leaned back on the cliff wall, cradling his tin cup and stretching his feet out toward the crackling fire. Dusk was settling into dark, and the desert air was cooling rapidly.
    Shannon felt almost fully human. She’d given it a lot of thought, and she had a good idea. Considering the last idea one of them had come up with was her jumping off a cliff, she didn’t think this was so bad. “I’m searching for a city made of gold.”
    Crickets chirped in the background. A coyote howled. The wind gusted but not enough to disturb their sheltered fire.
    Too bad. A tornado would be a nice distraction about now. She just hoped Gabe wasn’t tempted to slip away in the dark.
    “Ummm… so… having any luck?”
    Shannon was tempted to hit him. “My father read every document he could that referred to a group of bishops that escaped from Madrid—”
    “Madrid, New Mexico? I’ve been through there. A little coal mining town. Don’t remember any bishops, although there might have been a house of worship. Maybe a Catholic—”
    “Madrid,
Spain
.” She wanted to add a knock on the head to get him to stop interrupting. Her great idea, about getting Gabe to help her on the next leg of her journey, was starting to feel not so great.
    “Oh, Spain. Sure. Heard of it. They speak Mexican there, right? Go on.”
    Shaking her head, Shannon continued. “A battle was coming, threatening Madrid, and these seven bishops were reported to have loaded up a king’s ransom in gold. They fled. Some say across the ocean.”
    “This year? They just got here?” Gabe looked up at the cliff as if willing to search for the bishops.
    “No, the battle that caused them to run happened in 1150.”
    “Eleven fifty?” Gabe pulled his hat off his head and tossed it aside, as if maybe he had a headache and was considering blaming it on an overly tight Stetson. “That’s about—” She saw his lips moving and his hands. He was counting on his fingers.
    Shannon couldn’t help counting along.
    “Seven hundred years ago?” He faced her, a skeptic if ever she saw one. “Didn’t the pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock in 1492? I learned that in school. The first folks from across the ocean to come to America?”
    “You want to hear this story or not?”
    There was an extended pause. He must really not want to hear it. Fine, she didn’t want to tell it either.
    “I just don’t get how a bunch of Catholic priests—”
    “Bishops.”
    “Who must have been dead for quite a while now—” Gabe’s dark eyes flickered in the firelight. Almost like he was mocking her. Exactly like he was mocking her.
    “Probably six hundred and fifty years at least.”
    “Got you stuck up on that cliff.” He was definitely mocking her.
    Shannon forged on. “The story goes that they made their escape across the ocean to America. With shiploads of gold and jewels, they settled in the West. But they told no one.”
    “That part’s true for sure.”
    She needed a stick to whack him if she was going to get through this.
    “Stories emerged—”
    “Emerged from where if they told no one?”
    Shannon spoke through clenched teeth. “About cities built with gold.”
    “Uh… did they take enough gold to build whole cities or did they find some of it once they got here? How many ships does it take to carry enough gold to build a city? Was it solid gold or just—”
    “Shut up and listen.”
    “Go on.” Gabe threw another stick on the fire.
    “So have you heard of Coronado?”
    “It’s in California. On the ocean. One time I took a ship to—”
    “Gabe!”
    “What?”
    “It’s a
man
. I mean
he’s
a man. Francisco Coronado is a man who came from Spain searching for the cities of gold.”
    “The ones that came over hundreds of years before the Pilgrims, on all those big ships, and didn’t tell anybody,