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"No, my burro. Mr. Periwinkle is getting up there in age and can't graze too well on his own."
Loren held out her hand. "It's been fun listening to your stories, Mr. . ."
"Cussler, Clive Cussler. Mighty nice to have met you, ma'am."
When they were on the road again, the Pierce Arrow and its trailer smoothly rolling toward the border crossing, Pitt turned to Loren. "For a moment there, I thought the old geezer might have given me a clue to the treasure site."
"You mean Yaeger's far-out translation about a river running under an island?"
"It still doesn't seem geologically possible."
Loren turned the rearview mirror to reapply her lipstick. "If the river flowed deep enough it might conceivably pass under the Gulf."
"Maybe, but there's no way in hell to know for certain without drilling through several kilometers of hard rock.
"You'll be lucky just to find your way to the treasure cavern without a major excavation."
Pitt smiled as he stared at the road ahead. "He could really spin the yarns, couldn't he?"
"The old cook? He certainly had an active imagination."
"I'm sorry I didn't get his name."
Loren settled back in the seat and gazed out her window as the dunes gave way to a tapestry of mesquite and cactus. "He told me what it was."
"And?"
"It was an odd name." She paused, trying to remember. Then she shrugged in defeat. "Funny thing . . .
I've already forgotten it."
Loren was driving when they reached San Felipe. Pitt had stretched out in the backseat and was snoring away, but she did not bother to wake him. She guided the dusty, bug-splattered Pierce Arrow around the town's traffic circle, making a wide turn so she didn't run one side of the trailer over the curb, and turned south toward the town's breakwater-enclosed harbor. She did not expect to see such a proliferation of hotels and restaurants. The once sleepy fishing village was riding the crest of a tourist boom. Resorts appeared to be under construction up and down the beaches.
Five kilometers (3 miles) south of town she turned left on a road leading toward the waters of the Gulf.
Loren thought it strange that an artificial, man-made harbor had been constructed on such an exposed piece of shoreline. She thought a more practical site would have been under the shelter of Macharro Point several kilometers to the north. Oh well, she decided. What did gringos know about Baja politics?
Loren stopped the Pierce alongside an antiquated ferryboat that looked like a ghost from a scrap yard.
The impression was heightened by the low tide that had left the ferry's hull tipped drunkenly on an angle with its keel sunk into the harbor bottom's silt.
"Rise and shine, big boy," she said, reaching over the seat and shaking Pitt.
He blinked and peered curiously through the side window at the old boat. "I must have entered a time warp or I've fallen into the Twilight Zone. Which is it?"
"Neither. You're at the harbor in San Felipe, and you're looking at your home for the next two weeks."
"Good lord," Pitt mumbled in amazement, "an honest-to-God steamboat with a walking beam engine and side paddlewheels."
"I must admit it does have an air of Mark Twain about it.
"What do you want to bet it ferried Grant's troops across the Mississippi to Vicksburg?"
Gunn and Giordino spotted them and waved. They walked across a gangplank to the dock as Pitt and Loren climbed from the car and stood gazing at
the boat.
"Have a good trip?" asked Gunn.
