Augustus Simpson Tilly had been on this desert since the end of the Korean War. Buck, his mule, had been with him for a third of that time, and they had both become something of a legend in these parts, along with the mountains he prospected. The locals referred to him as Crazy Gus or Old Nut Case, depending on their age. The old man knew they called him those things and didn't really care. He heard the whispers and the not-too-quiet laughter that followed him in the Broken Cactus Bar and Grill in Chato's Crawl, just down the road from Apache Junction. Julie Dawes, the owner of the bar, would shush them, then buy Gus a beer and tell him they didn't know any better. But Gus knew deep down they did. He knew how he looked to others: old, grizzled, dirty, and every year of his life chiseled onto a face that had seen the worst in others.

Gus had lived through the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, a long and forgotten valley that most history books try to skip over. It was one of those moments that would haunt the army and Marines forever. Gus had had to live through strapping the bodies of his best friends to the sides of tanks just to get them out of that frozen valley of death. He watched as men, his men, perished in the cold and snow. It had been a bloody, grim time, and after seeing what mankind was capable of doing to one another, he chose the company of Buck. And the reason way he now lived in the desert wasn't just for chasing the legend of a lost gold mine and all its riches. He was there just to be warm. He lamented the scorching heat to those that would listen, but inside it warmed him in places that he thought the sun could never reach again because of those freezing, desperate days in Korea. The desert had become his closest friend for the last fifty years, his shelter from a world he had found was better off without him.